PodSearch

Upgrade

304: Somebody’s Gotta Do It and It’s Gonna Be Us

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:08   From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, Episode 304.

00:00:13   And today's show is brought to you very kindly by Pingdom, Linode, and Bombas.

00:00:18   My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell.

00:00:22   Hi, Myke Hurley. What a week it's been.

00:00:25   Oh, yeah, I know. Big. Like, about as big a week as weeks can be has been the last week.

00:00:31   Really big, exciting stuff. We've got so much more to dig into.

00:00:36   Like, you know, I feel like after WWDC and our last episode, I felt like, "Oh, that was a big WWDC."

00:00:43   But then there's been a lot of stuff that's happened since as well.

00:00:46   That was literally one thing that happened last week.

00:00:49   Yeah, there was so much. So much.

00:00:51   Not even the State of the Union, let alone four more days with hundreds of sessions.

00:00:56   Just the one thing. And I felt like, "Yeah, well, this was a big week on Monday morning."

00:01:01   And we're going to get into some of that. But I think we'll just say we're out of the top.

00:01:03   We have a big interview coming later on in this episode.

00:01:06   So we're going to talk about some of the little extra things that we found out about WWDC.

00:01:11   But later on in the episode, we're going to be joined by Bob Borchers and Ronak Shah

00:01:15   from Apple's Product Marketing team.

00:01:17   And we're going to be talking about macOS Big Sur and Safari.

00:01:21   So I'm really, really excited to bring that interview to our upgradients.

00:01:25   Yes, indeed. We talked to them last week. They were at Apple Park.

00:01:29   It was very exciting. And we will be playing that later.

00:01:32   But before we begin, I have a #snowtalk question for you from Steven.

00:01:36   What was your favorite lunch that you had during WWDC 2020?

00:01:41   I hate no-box lunches. And honestly, it was such a busy week.

00:01:47   I didn't even go outside, basically. And my lunch situation was grim,

00:01:54   because I'm sharing the house with teenagers who eat everything.

00:01:58   And so we ran out of lunch meat at one point. So I had a series of sad give-up lunches.

00:02:05   I had some pita chips and hummus one day, was all I could muster.

00:02:11   I had some English muffins with peanut butter and jelly on them,

00:02:16   which was lovely, except that's also what I had for breakfast that day.

00:02:19   Right. That's a little breakfast.

00:02:22   I did have a turkey sandwich at least once, maybe twice.

00:02:26   And that's generally my go-to, is a turkey sandwich,

00:02:29   sometimes a peanut butter sandwich, and sometimes leftovers.

00:02:32   But I don't think I had any leftovers last week.

00:02:34   So nothing spectacular. In other words, it was a WWDC lunch.

00:02:38   [ Laughs ]

00:02:41   If you would like to send in a #snowtalk question to help us

00:02:45   start an episode of Upgrade, you can just send out a tweet with the #snowtalk.

00:02:49   Or now, if you're in the Real AFM members Discord,

00:02:52   just use the question mark sign followed by #snowtalk,

00:02:55   and you can submit a question there, too.

00:02:57   So let's talk about some of the little things that we found out

00:03:01   over the intervening week from WWDC.

00:03:03   A lot of stuff that we didn't know about, a lot of things which are new and exciting.

00:03:08   One of them was an accessibility feature that lots of people have been really excited about.

00:03:12   I've been seeing this in lots of YouTube videos and stuff,

00:03:15   which is a feature called Back Tap.

00:03:17   So you can double or triple tap on the back of an iPhone,

00:03:21   and it can perform a set of actions.

00:03:23   And there are some ones that Apple define,

00:03:25   but probably the best one is you can set a shortcut action right there as well.

00:03:29   So you could run a shortcut, open any application,

00:03:32   or basically anything you can do with shortcuts, you can do.

00:03:35   And you can set two of these, both double and triple tap.

00:03:39   And now this is like a really cool little feature that --

00:03:42   this is as we talk about every year, I think we find something like this now,

00:03:45   where something is an accessibility feature,

00:03:48   and it has been created for really great reasons, right,

00:03:50   to help people who need a little bit more assistance in using their device.

00:03:54   But one of the great things about accessibility features

00:03:57   is that they can benefit everyone, and this is one of those features, I think.

00:04:02   - Yeah, again, the story with accessibility is that not only is it serving specific audiences,

00:04:09   but there are all sorts of other people who can benefit from it.

00:04:11   And that's one of the reasons that accessibility is important,

00:04:15   is that everybody needs accessibility to a certain degree at some point in their lives.

00:04:20   You know, if you are fortunate enough to live to an old age,

00:04:23   you're going to have accessibility needs that you don't have right now, possibly.

00:04:28   And Apple -- this is one of those great examples where Apple makes a feature with one audience in mind,

00:04:35   but it's got a broader reach, too.

00:04:39   So it's another great thing about Apple, caring about accessibility.

00:04:44   - Yeah, and I'm not running the beta on my phone yet,

00:04:49   so I haven't worked out exactly what I would set this up for,

00:04:52   but I'm thinking probably camera for one,

00:04:56   and then I don't know what I would set my triple-tap as,

00:04:59   but I feel like the camera is a pretty good double-tap action for me.

00:05:03   What do you think you might do?

00:05:05   - I don't know.

00:05:08   The shortcut stuff tempts me.

00:05:10   Like, could I turn on the light or unlock my front door or something like that?

00:05:16   Maybe.

00:05:17   So I might go with that.

00:05:20   But camera's a good one, too.

00:05:22   Yeah, I will explore it.

00:05:23   I have it on a beta on an iPhone, but not my primary iPhone, because I'm not a maniac.

00:05:32   - Right.

00:05:32   Okay.

00:05:34   I think a lot of the upgrading is Maniacs JSON.

00:05:36   - Yeah.

00:05:37   Oh, yeah, I know, and I love them.

00:05:38   They're beautiful maniacs, but I'm not willing yet.

00:05:42   You know, the betas come out, and you're like, "Yeah, it's a long summer.

00:05:46   Do I want to have beta software on all my devices that I rely on for the whole summer?"

00:05:52   And, you know, I can usually put it off for a few weeks.

00:05:57   So I have.

00:06:00   - The force touch gesture and action, I guess, feature, I would say,

00:06:06   is probably a better way of describing it, is gone from watchOS 7.

00:06:10   - Yeah.

00:06:11   Yeah, and that has some big interface ramifications.

00:06:13   There's actually a whole session about this, not about force touch.

00:06:16   It's about new UI in watchOS, and a lot of it is about getting rid of this

00:06:23   contextual menu thing through force touch that is not discoverable.

00:06:28   We've known since it first started that it's not discoverable.

00:06:32   Obviously, there was a period where Apple thought that pressing harder on a screen

00:06:36   was something that people would do, and they have now realized that that's not

00:06:40   a thing that anyone will do, and so they're pulling it out.

00:06:43   And I think we're going to see in watchOS 7, you're going to see a lot more kind

00:06:47   of like floating icons over portions of the screen to indicate there's more to do,

00:06:51   like you would see on iOS.

00:06:54   You're going to see more hierarchical menus, like where you can go in deeper

00:06:58   down and then back up.

00:07:00   You're going to see more actions in list views where you'll scroll up or down to

00:07:03   the bottom or top of a list, and you'll have more like actions that might

00:07:08   previously have been hidden.

00:07:10   I think it's actually going to be better because they're more discoverable than

00:07:13   the force touches, but I suspect it also means that the next Apple Watch is going

00:07:18   to be able to be thinner because it's not going to have to have all of the force

00:07:24   touch hardware that senses the extra pressure on the screen.

00:07:29   I will say for myself that since Apple removed 3D touch and made it like long

00:07:35   pressing, like the haptic touch, which is long pressing, I can never get the watch

00:07:40   thing to work the way I expect it to because I don't press anymore.

00:07:44   I just hold my finger on my thumb on my iPhone or my iPad, right?

00:07:48   Like I just hold it in place and it will perform the action that I want.

00:07:52   So when I'm on my watch and I want to say like clear all the notifications,

00:07:56   I just find myself just holding my finger on the display,

00:07:59   but that's not doing what it needs.

00:08:00   I actually need to apply the pressure.

00:08:02   So I think for consistency across all of the devices, it actually makes sense

00:08:07   to remove this feature, I think.

00:08:09   But I'm intrigued to see from a hardware perspective, what does this enable Apple

00:08:13   to do?

00:08:14   Because it's going to give them something, right?

00:08:17   And I'm intrigued to see what that ends up providing them with by removing

00:08:21   the functionality there.

00:08:23   Yeah, it could be thinner, it could have more battery, it could be something else.

00:08:25   Who knows?

00:08:26   There have been so many improvements to shortcuts.

00:08:30   More than we'll mention here, we might get into this in a future episode,

00:08:34   but just at a very high level, lots of new automation triggers,

00:08:39   lots of new ones, and pretty much all of the automations can be run

00:08:43   in the background, which we wanted, which is fantastic.

00:08:46   So you can set a time of day automation and it will run without your confirmation.

00:08:50   That stuff is fantastic.

00:08:52   Plus, you know, organization, there's a basic and entire overhaul of a lot of the application.

00:08:58   They've really embraced the design for iPad idea that Apple was talking about,

00:09:03   with sidebars and stuff like that.

00:09:05   And you can also copy and paste actions when you're creating shortcuts now as well,

00:09:10   which is way better.

00:09:12   Yeah, yeah.

00:09:13   The folders is great for organization.

00:09:16   The colors are more bright and nice, which is good in terms of getting visual

00:09:21   distinctiveness.

00:09:23   Shortcuts runs on the Apple Watch now too, and you can save not just the shortcuts icon,

00:09:28   but individual shortcut icons as complications,

00:09:33   and then you tap them and it runs that shortcut, which is pretty awesome.

00:09:37   There's a new date picker on iOS and iPadOS.

00:09:40   So the scrolling wheel is gone and it's been replaced by a calendar,

00:09:45   which you can just tap the date of, and then you tap and change the time by typing them in as numbers.

00:09:51   I absolutely love this.

00:09:54   This was something that I didn't know I wanted until I had it.

00:09:57   The UI that has been around on the iPhone for so long of picking dates and times,

00:10:05   that has definitely grown old.

00:10:08   And we saw this with Catalyst, right?

00:10:10   They brought it with Mac Catalyst to the Mac, and it was a bad idea.

00:10:15   And I would assume that in thinking about that, they've also rethought the way that date pickers

00:10:19   should be done on iOS and iPadOS, and it's way nicer.

00:10:24   - Yeah, you only see the spinning wheel on if you...

00:10:27   So the date picker is a month, and then if you need to choose a different month or year,

00:10:32   that's a spinning wheel, at least on the iPad it is.

00:10:35   - That works.

00:10:36   - But the primary interface doesn't have the spinning wheel in it anymore.

00:10:42   So it's not just on Catalyst, but on iPad, and it's good.

00:10:48   - All right, so what else do we have?

00:10:50   Oh, HomePod is getting third-party music service support.

00:10:53   Not a lot of information about this.

00:10:54   This was on the big bubble slide thing, and I missed it during the keynote.

00:11:00   But it was one of those little things in the word cloud, which were much more visual this year,

00:11:04   which is a third-party music support.

00:11:06   So you would assume this is one of the couple of things that Apple is doing to probably try

00:11:13   and combat against antitrust complaints.

00:11:16   So we spoke about email and browsers you'll be able to choose default on iOS and iPadOS,

00:11:21   and now you'll be able to presumably change your music service to Spotify or something like that

00:11:29   with the upcoming version of HomePod OS or whatever it's called.

00:11:37   - Yeah, it's good.

00:11:38   I'm glad...

00:11:39   The HomePod is still a product in their lineup.

00:11:41   It's good.

00:11:42   - The U1 chip finally has a purpose.

00:11:45   - Two purposes.

00:11:46   - Two purposes.

00:11:47   One of them was the cocky stuff, right?

00:11:51   I think what I mentioned that in the keynote, but there's been a session about that.

00:11:54   - Yeah, there's a session.

00:11:55   I watched it.

00:11:56   It's a German man who tells you about...who assumes that you're a car company.

00:12:01   He's like, "This presentation is for the car manufacturer."

00:12:04   So I'm like, "Nope, it's for me."

00:12:07   It isn't Werner Herzog, but it is a German fellow who works at Apple, which I think is funny.

00:12:12   Of course, the car presentation is from a German guy.

00:12:15   But it is...

00:12:18   As they mentioned in the keynote, the near term for car key is NFC, so it's like Apple Pay.

00:12:24   And there's a spec, there's like a car connectivity consortium, I think is the name of it, and Apple is part of it.

00:12:30   But it's a consortium, so it's car makers and tech people, tech companies, and it is trying to come up with a standard

00:12:36   so you can use your phone as a car key.

00:12:38   That's the bottom line.

00:12:39   How do you do that?

00:12:40   And the version 2.0 standard that's out there now is NFC.

00:12:44   So this BMW that they talked about that lets you do car key stuff this fall, that's NFC, which means that you have to hold your phone up to the door,

00:12:54   and then it unlocks.

00:12:55   And then you have to put your phone in an NFC cradle basically on the dash, and then you can start the car.

00:13:01   And that's because NFC, you've got to be very close, and they've got to have your verification, right?

00:13:07   You can't, just getting into the car and then that's it, you shouldn't be able to start the car.

00:13:12   So they need to have multiple NFC readers.

00:13:14   It's not ideal, but they're working on this 3.0 spec from the car connectivity consortium that's based on UWB, Ultra Wideband, which is the U1 chip.

00:13:24   And so that next wave of cars will support that, and that you don't have to even take your phone out of your pocket or purse or anything,

00:13:33   because UWB lets you do precision location.

00:13:38   And so it knows you're by the door, and it unlocks the door.

00:13:41   And then it knows your phone's inside the car, and it'll let you start the car.

00:13:46   So even though they made this initial announcement, and it's about NFC, in the car key session for auto manufacturers only, please,

00:13:55   they made it very clear that UWB is where this is going.

00:14:00   And are you going to be able to buy a car with Ultra Wideband in it tomorrow?

00:14:04   No, but next year or the year after, these will start to roll out.

00:14:08   And this is one of those things where Apple makes an announcement now, and you're like, "Okay, but it doesn't impact my life now."

00:14:14   But if you buy a car five years from now, kind of like the rollout of CarPlay, five years from now, you will probably have an Ultra Wideband thing in your car

00:14:23   that will be your car key, and you won't need a car key anymore.

00:14:25   Your phone is your car key.

00:14:27   And once you do that, you can do things like share your car key with other people.

00:14:32   And this session talks about all the security that they go through, all the cryptographic key exchanges and endorsements and things that happen in the background

00:14:40   so that you can send your friend your car key and say, "Don't put a scratch on it. Here's the key."

00:14:48   And you can do all sorts of stuff like that.

00:14:50   You can send them, and then you can de-auth them, and you can control them.

00:14:53   And it's very cool.

00:14:54   And Ultra Wideband's a part of that.

00:14:57   -They also announced with another session called the Nearby Interaction Framework.

00:15:03   So this allows developers to be able to use the U1 chip to kind of tell if devices are close to each other.

00:15:10   So Apple are now opening this up.

00:15:12   They've got an API, so you'll be able to do things to tell how far apart different devices are.

00:15:19   This could be used for games.

00:15:20   It could be used for many other purposes, I guess.

00:15:23   But it's good to see that they're opening this up because it will actually bring more use cases for this technology for applications that believe that they can use it.

00:15:33   Which is good because, as we've made many jokes in the past, Apple put this chip in their devices.

00:15:39   I mean, to their credit, they didn't really talk about it a lot.

00:15:42   But they've put this chip in their devices, and it's not doing anything right now.

00:15:45   So it's cool to see that they put this in there.

00:15:49   And I guess the good thing about it is, is when they do have stuff start coming out for this later this year,

00:15:55   Apple will be on their second generation of devices that has these chips in it,

00:16:00   which is better than what they have done this type of stuff in the past, where it's like,

00:16:05   "Hey, new device has this. You have to get your new device."

00:16:07   Right? So it's cool. They'll have a wider install base for this technology.

00:16:12   And it may be that this goes to other devices. In the car key thing, they specifically mentioned Apple Watch,

00:16:23   which they haven't said anywhere else that NFC should work with the Apple Watch for car key.

00:16:27   The problem with the car key is that it'll let you in, but unless you take your watch off and lay it down in the dash, it won't actually work.

00:16:33   But a future Apple Watch could have a U1 or other ultra-wideband built into it.

00:16:37   And at that point, you literally don't need anything but just walk up to your car and it unlocks for you, because you've got your watch on.

00:16:45   And then you can start the car because you've got your watch on.

00:16:48   So they'll get there, but I think that's the question, because there's no NFC in the iPad, for example.

00:16:53   So will there be a U1 in a future iPad or not? It's unclear.

00:16:56   But the idea that the location interaction stuff, which is a fun session where a guy has an app where it's like a monkey that changes depending on how close you get,

00:17:06   and at the end of it, he goes all the way to the far end of the room and gives a thumbs up because he's found the other phone.

00:17:12   I enjoyed that session actually a lot.

00:17:15   But I don't know what the application for that is, but it is cool that third parties get access to that stuff,

00:17:20   because otherwise it was just that weird airdrop feature that nobody used.

00:17:23   And there's been some information about new boot and recovery modes for Apple Silicon Max.

00:17:30   Can you tell me what this is all about?

00:17:32   Yeah, so they changed everything about this.

00:17:36   We're going to get back to this, but the Apple Silicon Max is an opportunity for Apple to change a lot of things that have just been the way they've been for a long time on Mac,

00:17:47   sometimes because they have to build it again.

00:17:50   Like the bootloader here, they're essentially, I think, using the iPhone and iPad bootloader.

00:17:54   So they're using iPhone and iPad tech.

00:17:59   So they have to say, "Okay, well, how do we want new Macs to boot? How do we want them to boot?"

00:18:04   And we're going to have to build it, because we aren't going to use the old system.

00:18:08   We have to build a new system.

00:18:09   So it forces them, kind of like the iPad pointer actually, it forces them to do a modern take on what Mac users expect from startup.

00:18:20   And you may say to yourself, "I don't expect anything from startup.

00:18:23   I just want my computer to start up."

00:18:24   But think about all of those keyboard shortcuts that all your friends ask you about when they're desperate, which is like, "How do I get to recovery mode?

00:18:33   How do I zap the PRAM? How do I boot off an external drive? How do I get to single user mode?"

00:18:37   They probably don't ask that, but it's pretty cool.

00:18:40   And the answer is always like different keyboard shortcuts and stuff.

00:18:43   And that's all part of the boot process.

00:18:45   - Yeah, like restart the Mac whilst holding Command R.

00:18:50   And it's always one of these things where you need to be able to look it up to do it.

00:18:57   But what if the device that you need to look it up on is the one you now can't boot properly?

00:19:03   So having a kind of...

00:19:06   And it's kind of, I think these days, everybody knows you're having a problem with your device.

00:19:10   Just whatever you do to turn it off, hold that and something will happen.

00:19:15   - So this is the new system.

00:19:17   So the new system they built, forget about all those keyboard shortcuts.

00:19:20   You hold down the power button on startup.

00:19:22   - Which is great.

00:19:23   - And on laptops, it's that Touch ID button.

00:19:25   It is essentially the power button.

00:19:27   Presumably on desktops, it will literally be the power button.

00:19:30   Just not on a keyboard, just the button.

00:19:32   You hold it down.

00:19:34   And what will happen is it will come up with something that looks very much actually like

00:19:37   if you hold down Option today.

00:19:39   It's kind of a black background with your bootable disks visible on the screen.

00:19:43   But there's also a gear icon for other options.

00:19:45   And then that's recovery mode you're in right then.

00:19:48   And you can choose at that point to go to other options.

00:19:51   You can run the disk utility.

00:19:52   You can do an internet restore of macOS if your version of macOS is messed up.

00:19:59   Like all of it is rolled into that.

00:20:03   What's interesting about this is that also means that they had to add support for multiple bootable drives to the bootloader.

00:20:11   Because if you think about it, you can install two versions of iPadOS on an iPad and choose from startup disk which one to boot from, right?

00:20:19   There's only one on the iPhone and the iPad.

00:20:21   There's only one.

00:20:22   But Mac users expect to be able to have this version here and another version there or two separate installs and be able to boot from one externally and the other one internally and all that stuff.

00:20:32   And Apple has built all that stuff in.

00:20:34   So it's another example of Apple kind of like putting together a new take on what Mac users expect because they had to build it again in 2020.

00:20:44   What does that look like in 2020?

00:20:45   Instead of the thing that they kind of built up over the course of 20 years, it's their new take on it.

00:20:51   And that goes to, you know, like recovery is an example where on current Macs you have your boot partition and then you have like the secret recovery partition.

00:21:00   And if that isn't there, then you just have to do internet recovery.

00:21:03   Well, apparently on this version, there's your boot partition, your recovery partition, and then there's like the super secret emergency partition.

00:21:11   And that one will boot if the other ones fail.

00:21:14   And it can then restore and start off that process.

00:21:19   So there's more kind of cached away that isn't on the internet now, but still, you know, it'll get you back up and running.

00:21:24   Anyway, it's very interesting.

00:21:26   I'm sure more details will come out, but anybody who supports Macs, whether it's as a profession or with their friends and family, this is going to change how we do that.

00:21:35   I hope for the better because, you know, it's much more straightforward, right?

00:21:40   You can just say, hold down the power button.

00:21:41   Okay, now you're going to see this screen, click on the gear, click on this, right?

00:21:45   And you'll be able to walk people through everything like that.

00:21:48   Oh, and target mode, which is a popular thing, you know, hold down command T when you start up and your computer becomes a disk drive, right?

00:21:56   That was always the, it was originally like the firewire target disk mode, and then it just became regular old target mode.

00:22:02   The idea there is like, you hold down that key command, your computer is now a hard drive, you plug it into another computer, you can see the contents of the hard drive.

00:22:08   They changed that as well.

00:22:10   Now your computer becomes a server, becomes a file server.

00:22:14   So you go into the options and you choose a sharing mode or disk sharing mode or something like that.

00:22:21   And basically in recovery, it becomes an SMB server.

00:22:26   So if you want to evacuate files off of it, now you can do that.

00:22:29   You don't even need a cable because presumably it's on your local network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and you can just connect to it in recovery mode and helicopter the files off that you need.

00:22:40   So lots of rethinking of what we think of as sort of traditional Mac features that they've had to re-implement, and they've done it in a modern way rather than just having it be a copy of what was there before for Intel.

00:22:54   And I think the last thing I wanted to mention today was, I think what many people agreed on was one of the most entertaining session videos of everything that came out from WWDC, which was designed for the iPad OS pointer.

00:23:09   This is a fascinating session, which is mostly pretty high level talking about design and design decisions.

00:23:18   I'm assuming this is the team that created and developed the iPad OS pointer.

00:23:24   For sure.

00:23:25   It's four individuals who each go through different considerations that they made about what the iPad OS pointer is doing at a conceptual level, why they decided to make it look the way that it did, how you can design custom pointers and how they should interact.

00:23:39   This thing is an absolutely fantastic and fascinating session that I recommend everybody watch.

00:23:46   I agree.

00:23:47   It is a great session.

00:23:48   It was my favorite session of the week, and it is mostly not technical in the way that you're thinking a developer session would be.

00:23:58   It's, you know, because there are developer sessions where they get into the code and I keep hitting the 15 second skip button because it doesn't, it's not going to, it's not for me.

00:24:03   Yeah, don't watch the, I think it's called build for iPad OS pointer.

00:24:07   That's very technical.

00:24:08   Different type of things is designed for iPad OS.

00:24:11   So if you appreciate design, whether you're a designer or not, if you appreciate design or you appreciate finding out how the thing you use works and the principles behind it, if you like sort of taking apart or understanding better what's going on, whether or not you use the iPad OS pointer.

00:24:30   But if you have, then you've experienced this and you're like, why is this different?

00:24:34   What decisions did they make?

00:24:35   Because it very much, like I said about all the boot stuff, this is reinventing the pointer.

00:24:39   This is literally saying, okay, in 1984, the pointer was invented for a certain purpose and we're essentially using the same one now, but in 2020, what do we want it to be?

00:24:49   And there's some fascinating things in there about like degrees of precision and why it's a circle and not an arrow and how it changes.

00:24:57   And it's really a great session.

00:24:58   I highly recommend it for anyone who cares about design functionality or just understanding why stuff works the way it does.

00:25:05   I also just wanted to note two pieces of follow out for two interviews that Craig Viderighi was involved with.

00:25:14   One was, I will recommend people go and watch the YouTube video that MKBHD made, which was content that was cut out of his podcast interview.

00:25:25   So he also released a longer interview on his waveform podcast with Craig Viderighi, but then did a kind of edited version, which I really liked the presentation of this.

00:25:35   It was like a video of responding to kind of his viewers, their comments, the things that they weren't sure about, the things they wanted more information on.

00:25:45   And it was like Marquez would kind of set up a point and then go to ask Craig what it was and get Craig's input on it.

00:25:54   It was a really nicely done video, obviously.

00:25:57   It's Marquez Brownlee, right?

00:25:58   So it's perfectly done, really well done.

00:26:02   The podcast interview itself on the waveform podcast is also interesting because Marquez and Craig actually talk about how the production was done for the keynote.

00:26:16   So that obviously, you know, Marquez is interested in that kind of stuff.

00:26:19   So that's also really good and I recommend that as well.

00:26:22   But the video itself is if you just want to spend 20 minutes or whatever, it's really nicely done.

00:26:27   So I recommend that.

00:26:28   And then of course, I mean, I'm sure everybody here has probably already seen the talk show with Craig, Viderighi and Jaws, right?

00:26:38   Was, was, uh, was John Gruber's guests this year.

00:26:42   So it's a video version again, and Craig and Jaws are at Apple Park.

00:26:47   And I assume that John Gruber is in his home office.

00:26:49   Yes, or, or a location, uh, it's a very nice location. I suspect it's not his actual office, but rather a, uh, a nice background chosen.

00:27:00   But maybe, maybe it is, maybe his office actually normally looks like that.

00:27:03   I don't know.

00:27:04   So yeah, obviously go watch those two, but I just wanted to mention in case people hadn't seen them yet, because they're also really good for giving a little bit more background, more information and, uh, video's nice too.

00:27:17   All right. This episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at Bombas.

00:27:23   June is Pride Month.

00:27:24   And while this year's celebrations are a little bit different than usual for some, there are still ways that we can all come together to support the LGBTQ+ community.

00:27:34   And Bombas is doing that with their new Pride collection.

00:27:36   These colorful socks bring more love, compassion, and comfort into the world because they also give back to those experiencing homelessness in the LGBTQ+ community.

00:27:48   Jason, I think that you got a set of these, right, from Bombas?

00:27:51   Well, I want to tell you, I got a whole package of Bombas socks.

00:27:54   And it made a whole collection of people happy because it was all of their different styles.

00:28:00   So like my friend, Tom, who is a runner, got the, like the low socks that don't go above your ankle.

00:28:07   And he told me he loves them and this was not, he was not compensated in any way.

00:28:13   He was like, Oh, I just ran with those yesterday.

00:28:14   They're so great.

00:28:15   I love them.

00:28:16   And I said, well, you can get more at Bombas.

00:28:18   I got a really cushy set of blue socks that I love that are super nice and that I've been loving wearing.

00:28:26   My daughter took the Pride socks away, which are super rainbowy.

00:28:30   And she's been wearing those and she thinks they're awesome too.

00:28:34   And I think my wife took a set, the fourth set, and likes those too.

00:28:38   So essentially we made a whole community happy, including my friend Tom, the runner, with the Bombas socks.

00:28:46   And yeah, my daughter immediately basically took the Pride socks and was like, I want them, I want them, I want them.

00:28:51   And they were gone.

00:28:52   So can she, she is very discerning in terms of her clothing and her style.

00:28:57   And she rolls her eyes at lots of podcast products that come into our house, but not those socks.

00:29:03   Definitely not.

00:29:04   So you should go and check them out for yourself.

00:29:07   These things are fantastic for every pair of colorful Pride socks that you buy.

00:29:11   Bombas will donate a pair to somebody in need in the LGBTQ+ community.

00:29:16   The designs are wonderful.

00:29:17   They have some cool tie dye designs.

00:29:18   I know Jason's a fan of tie dye too.

00:29:20   So they have those.

00:29:21   They also have a set called Bright Miles, which look really nice as well.

00:29:24   Pride is usually a time when we can all come together, but because many Pride events were

00:29:28   canceled this year, it's more important than ever to find new ways to show support and give back to a community.

00:29:33   You can go to bombas.com/upgrade right now and shop the Pride collection and get 20% off your first order.

00:29:40   That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com/upgrade.

00:29:43   Our thanks to Bombas for their support of upgrade and all of Relay FM.

00:29:47   All right.

00:29:48   So we're going to move into now our interview with Bob Borchers and Ronak Shah from Apple's Product Marketing team.

00:29:54   We're going to be talking about macOS Big Sur.

00:29:56   We're going to be talking about Safari.

00:29:58   As we mentioned, this interview was conducted last week and we hope that you really enjoy it.

00:30:02   Here it is.

00:30:03   So I wanted to start this by actually talking about Safari because obviously Safari is a

00:30:09   massively important part of any version of macOS.

00:30:12   It's probably for many people, the app that they have open all day, every day, they do most of their work in.

00:30:20   But this year Safari and Big Sur has a ton of new features.

00:30:24   I think Craig called it the biggest update ever during the keynote.

00:30:28   And I really wanted to try and understand from your perspective, why is that?

00:30:33   I think that Craig is absolutely right.

00:30:36   This is the biggest release of Safari that we've done really since we first introduced it.

00:30:42   And it starts with a lot of the hallmark features that people have come to know and love around Safari.

00:30:48   Things like industry leading performance.

00:30:50   We're improving JavaScript performance, continue to lead the industry there.

00:30:55   We have industry leading battery life.

00:30:56   So we're delivering this amazing performance, letting you browse and stream video longer than other popular browsers.

00:31:02   We're upping the ante on privacy.

00:31:05   We have a pioneering track record on protecting user privacy in Safari.

00:31:09   And this year with the privacy report, we're raising awareness around how Safari protects you.

00:31:14   Making it really easy for users with a click of a button to see what trackers are being blocked as they browse the web, which is really cool.

00:31:21   We're also improving extensions.

00:31:23   And so now we're going to support the new web extension API.

00:31:26   So this whole range of extensions that are out there, developers are going to be able to easily bring those to Safari.

00:31:32   We're even shipping tools in Xcode to make it really easy for developers to do that.

00:31:36   And once they've done it, we built an all new category on the Mac App Store to showcase those extensions with editorial and top charts.

00:31:43   So users can discover those great extensions and start using them, which is awesome.

00:31:47   And then in addition to all of that, we have a whole set of additional features.

00:31:51   Everything from the customizable start page that lets you add new types of content like the reading list or your iCloud tabs.

00:31:58   Lets you customize your background image to an all new tab design that's more space efficient.

00:32:04   That allows you to see your favicons by default.

00:32:07   It's really awesome.

00:32:08   And then we built in translation right into Safari too.

00:32:11   So now as you browse the web and come across a site that you want to translate, we've got a really elegant experience to do that.

00:32:18   So just a huge release of Safari this year.

00:32:20   We think users are going to love it.

00:32:22   So let's maybe hit those really quickly in turn.

00:32:25   In terms of the privacy, you know, you showed it.

00:32:28   There's some judgment that's going to happen when you visit a site to help the users understand sort of what's going on behind the scenes, which I think it's really interesting.

00:32:37   I think it's definitely in fitting with sort of Apple's approach to security and privacy on the web.

00:32:42   Can you talk a little bit about the thought process of getting a little more in users faces with disclosure about what their web browser is doing and what their sites they're visiting are doing when they visit them?

00:32:53   Sure.

00:32:54   So we've been doing this on the user's behalf for a while now.

00:32:57   We first introduced intelligent tracking prevention in 2017.

00:33:00   And so we've been blocking this type of third party tracking for a while now.

00:33:04   We want to raise awareness and let users know that this is happening and give them information that makes them more aware of the tracking that's being attempted as they browse the web.

00:33:15   And so with a click, they can see the trackers that are attempting to track them on the current website, or they can get even more information and see those trackers for the past 30 days.

00:33:25   And I think, Ronik, as well, when you were talking about extensions, that's another great place where I don't think consumers know enough about the potential risks that you have with extensions.

00:33:35   They're incredibly powerful, right?

00:33:37   And they do some amazing things and developers have been phenomenally creative with them.

00:33:42   But they also introduce some privacy risks that I think are really important for us and others to educate users about so that they know, hey, with this great power comes some risk.

00:33:53   And we have a responsibility to help people see that.

00:33:57   And one of the things that we're doing there is when you enable extension for the first time and you go to a site and you want to use it, when you click, we'll ask you how much access you want to give to that extension, whether you want to give access just to the site, just for the day, or if you want the extension to be able to access anything that you browse.

00:34:13   And so we think it's really important to be able to give that users that level of control as they use extensions.

00:34:19   And by the way, I am definitely going to be using that recipe extension that Beth showed in the keynote.

00:34:23   That is just phenomenal.

00:34:25   Oh, my God.

00:34:26   Yeah.

00:34:26   My wife turned to me when we were watching it and said, I want this because every website has like paragraphs upon paragraphs of text before they actually show the recipe.

00:34:36   I didn't know we were going to talk about search engine optimization in cooking blogs, but oh boy, yes, absolutely.

00:34:41   I'm right there with you.

00:34:42   They all know what they're doing, but I don't like it.

00:34:44   It's kind of user hostile.

00:34:46   I want to talk about extensions too.

00:34:47   I'm a Safari user everywhere.

00:34:49   And yet there are certain things where I have the stuff that I do in Chrome and a lot of it has to do with some very specific extensions.

00:34:58   So I was excited by this.

00:35:00   It seems to me, I don't know a lot about extension browser extension development, but it sounds like most of the extensions that are out there that are based on chromium.

00:35:09   So, you know, I know Firefox, but also Chrome comes from that.

00:35:13   Is the idea here that it shouldn't be a complete rewrite or anything like that for these extensions to come over that because you're using this specific format that the developers of those extensions will fairly quickly be able to bring them up on Safari?

00:35:25   That's right.

00:35:26   In a lot of cases, developers won't have to make any changes at all.

00:35:29   Simply need to use the tools to package up their extension and they'll be able to publish those to the app store directly.

00:35:34   In some cases, developers will have to make some minor modifications, but we expect that Chrome and Firefox extension developers are going to have a pretty straightforward time bringing these extensions to Safari, getting them on the Mac store and having all of our users be able to download and use them.

00:35:48   And Ronik, isn't a lot of that functionality built into Xcode 12?

00:35:52   That's right.

00:35:52   And so we're shipping tools in Xcode 12 that make all of that really seamless that can automatically package up these extensions and formats that are used by other browsers.

00:36:01   So developers have a really streamlined process to do all of this.

00:36:04   And a lot of those extensions that I'm using, I'm using on one website where I'm using them, you know, one session and then I don't use them again for another month.

00:36:11   And I like the idea that I can say, okay, now I'm using you and know that when I go to that browser a week later, it's not sitting there loading, you know, reading every single page.

00:36:21   I can just have it on when I want.

00:36:23   And then it goes away, which is nice.

00:36:24   Yeah, we think users are going to love that.

00:36:26   It's going to give you control.

00:36:28   And it's just a really nice way to know exactly what extensions can access.

00:36:33   I actually wanted to follow up on the privacy stuff that you were saying, Ronak, like that you obviously at Apple have been seeing and have been able to keep a track of a lot of the trackers and the stuff that's been following around people on the web.

00:36:46   But with the new Safari features, it brings them to the forefront for people.

00:36:50   But there's a shield icon in the toolbar which people can tap and they can see about the trackers.

00:36:56   Do you think that this level of putting it in front of people's faces will educate them more in that they may then start to demand change from the websites that they visit?

00:37:07   We hope so.

00:37:08   I mean, certainly we want a part of this is raising awareness for users.

00:37:11   Part of it is also we're also doing in the hope that users will demand more.

00:37:15   And if that's where this goes, I think that that's great.

00:37:18   And if it also means that users expect more, not just from the sites they visit, but from the browsers that they use, that's great, too.

00:37:25   We want this not only to be about raising awareness, but also hopefully to help push the industry forward in terms of how users get tracked on the web.

00:37:34   Yeah, and I think if you look at the privacy principles that Craig outlined at the very beginning of the section in the keynote, there were four.

00:37:41   And the last one and the one we've been really focused on is about transparency and control.

00:37:45   It is about knowing what is happening that then allows you to demand and to take control.

00:37:51   And when people think about privacy, they understand that there is a risk there, but they don't necessarily know what to do about it.

00:37:57   And what we really want to do is to bring some of these things to the fore so they can become more educated, they can become more demanding, they can demand of all of us to do better.

00:38:08   And that only starts when you actually know about what's going on.

00:38:10   And that's why that transparency kind of pillar is so critical to privacy in so many different places.

00:38:17   Another part of privacy and security when it comes to the web is passwords.

00:38:22   Can we talk a little bit about some of the password functionalities in the new version of Safari?

00:38:26   Absolutely.

00:38:28   So in addition to monitoring unwanted tracking, we're also this year securely monitoring your saved passwords.

00:38:35   And one of the really cool things that we can do now is securely detect if one of your saved passwords is involved in a data breach.

00:38:43   And we use a cryptographic derivation of your password so Apple doesn't get your password information, but we can compare that derivation against lists of breached passwords.

00:38:52   And if your password is involved in a data breach, we can alert you and we make it really easy to upgrade to a securely generated password that's more secure.

00:39:00   So that's what I was going to ask is you're not just looking at like sources that were breached, you're looking at did my password get leaked in a data breach, my specific password?

00:39:09   That's right.

00:39:10   And we can do that in a secure way where we don't get that information, but we can make the comparison and let you know.

00:39:16   So we're super excited to be releasing that this year, both on macOS and iOS as well.

00:39:22   From a user perspective, do they see that when they go to log into that website again?

00:39:26   Or is there kind of a different flow where it alerts people as soon as it's been found out?

00:39:31   So we'll actually notify you if we detect that your password's been in a data breach.

00:39:36   And we also alert you in the password settings as well.

00:39:40   I wanted to ask about page translation because we all get the idea, right?

00:39:43   I go to a page that is in a language I don't have in my list of languages, and so I don't understand it.

00:39:49   And this is always, I will tell you, it is always somebody sending me to an amazing investigative report on Spiegel or one of these other German websites.

00:39:57   I'm like, okay, I took high school German, but I want to know about like behind the obvious, which is now Safari can translate that page, which is great.

00:40:06   I'm curious, sort of like, how does this work? Is it all happening on device? What is happening on device?

00:40:12   There's obviously language detection going on. Is that looking at the webpage literally saying, "I'm serving you German," or are you looking at the text on the webpage and detecting that it's German?

00:40:22   And then is it going over the internet to do that translation, or is it doing it on device?

00:40:26   The way it works is that we actually do all of the language detection on device.

00:40:30   So as you browse, we can detect what language the website that you're visiting is in.

00:40:34   And if a user decides that they want to use translation, we actually send the contents of the page, the text, to an Apple server.

00:40:42   It's not tied to your Apple ID, and that information is translated on our server.

00:40:46   That text is stored entirely in memory. We don't store it on disk at all.

00:40:51   We do the translation, send it back to Safari, and then we discard that information on the server side so that you get that translation information back to you.

00:40:59   Great. Safari also receives a lot of design refinements.

00:41:03   You were mentioning about, especially to the star page and stuff like that, which I think leads into talking about Big Sur in general.

00:41:11   Huge design changes for macOS. Why now for a lot of this stuff?

00:41:17   What about 2020? What about this version of macOS felt like the right time to start taking a look at what macOS looks like again?

00:41:27   Yeah, you know, it's a situation where we make design changes very carefully and thoughtfully because they have such huge ramifications.

00:41:37   In many cases, they are, we're talking about updating, you know, hundreds of millions of devices, and we carry that responsibility with a lot of weight and concern.

00:41:46   And what we want to do is we want to look at each of the platforms that we have and look for ways in which we can better match the capabilities of that platform together with the design and bring those components together.

00:42:00   And as we were looking at macOS and macOS Big Sur, we really felt like there was an opportunity here to use the palette of the operating system and use the entire beautiful large display that Macs have to give you better access,

00:42:16   faster access to your content and bring that forward in a way.

00:42:20   And so when you see things like the translucent menu bar, when you see kind of the layering of the different menu items and elements, that's really to bring what's most important to the fore and let the other pieces be available, but also be standing just slightly back.

00:42:35   And if you look at that great film that Alan did in the keynote, I think you get a real sense of that because he's talking about how these layers are being created and put up almost in 3D and thinking about, OK, how do you prioritize those pieces?

00:42:52   And so for us, you know, we want to make the best use of the platform that we have, but we also want to balance that with a degree of familiarity.

00:43:03   So somebody who is coming from a different device, coming across to the Mac, for example, we want them to be able to be instantly comfortable, but at the same time, make sure that we're doing things that are kind of authentic to the platform.

00:43:17   A great case in point are the icons on the dock.

00:43:20   If you look at them, look at the mail icon, for example, it's instantly familiar.

00:43:25   But if you zoom in, it's got the craft and the care and the beauty that Mac icons have been known for since the beginning.

00:43:32   You know, zoom in and you'll see embossed in the back of the envelope is Apple Park, Cupertino, California.

00:43:39   Right. It's those thoughtful touches that provide the continuity and kind of help people understand, you know, the Mac is still a Mac and it's amazing.

00:43:47   But we're also providing a degree of familiarity with these these other platforms while at the same time advancing kind of the design purpose that's within macOS Big Sur.

00:43:57   So we think it's a phenomenal design update.

00:44:00   We think people are going to love it and just excited for people to get their hands on it.

00:44:04   The dock icons are kind of a perfect metaphor, I think, for what's happening in Big Sur, where, as you say, there is an element for the UI design and bringing consistency,

00:44:14   but not forgetting what the Mac is, what its history is, where it's come from by going to those levels, to putting in little Easter eggs,

00:44:22   to just really having those icons be much more detailed than their counterparts on iOS, which speaks to the fact that macOS is macOS.

00:44:32   Yeah. And it's beyond even just the visual approach, right?

00:44:35   If you go and look at what we've done with sounds, you know, the Mac is a platform.

00:44:39   If you look at the latest generation of hardware, the audio ability of the Mac both to record and playback is phenomenal.

00:44:47   And it created a great opportunity to kind of rethink and reimagine some of the sounds.

00:44:53   And we've gone and created very familiar but slight riffs off of things that we've had for many, many years,

00:45:00   and even, you know, done things like bring back the boot chime as a way to signal, "Hey, yes, this is a new macOS with macOS Big Sur,

00:45:11   but it stands on the shoulders of kind of the great leaps in the operating system to date."

00:45:16   It definitely feels momentous. We've got not only my favorite thing, which is version numbers, where we go to version 11,

00:45:23   but you've got the Apple Silicon coming in with those Macs, and you've got this design refresh.

00:45:28   It definitely feels it's been 20 years since OS X started, really.

00:45:32   It does feel like this is sort of almost like a generational change.

00:45:35   It does feel like it's the biggest visual refresh for sure, since Aqua or since sort of Aqua got muted, but it's been a long time.

00:45:44   So it all feels like this is a good time for change because everything is changing to a certain degree.

00:45:51   Yeah, I think there is a moment in time where you want to kind of move things forward in a significant way,

00:45:59   and this is that moment in time.

00:46:01   Now, that being said, if you look at it, you know, our operating systems actually have kind of two levels of names, right?

00:46:08   There is macOS Big Sur, which is following the tradition of California locations.

00:46:13   And by the way, I think Big Sur is the perfect name for this because anybody who's visited Big Sur knows it's this amazing combination of power and beauty,

00:46:21   and that I think really is appropriate for this release.

00:46:26   And we've continued that tradition, going from Catalina now to Big Sur.

00:46:31   But then the version number, which speaks really significantly to the developer community,

00:46:36   is where we have also signaled this is a big moment in time by going from version 10 to version 11,

00:46:44   and really helping people, you know, if they didn't already know, it's time to kind of sit up and take notice.

00:46:50   Obviously, every year is a big year for the Mac, this one included.

00:46:54   As well as being a Mac professional, like I record and edit all my shows on Macs,

00:46:58   I'm also a big iPad professional as well, and I use the iPad quite a lot.

00:47:03   And one of the things that I was really excited about with the whole keynote as a whole,

00:47:07   is seeing how there are elements of iPad OS design and the new macOS design

00:47:14   that seem to be kind of coexisting and moving along together.

00:47:19   Is that a consideration now that these two platforms are kind of becoming a little bit closer in their visual consistency

00:47:27   to try and help maybe bridge the gap for people like me that work on both platforms?

00:47:32   I'd say functionality, let's throw that in there too. I mean, obviously, added keyboard and pointer support.

00:47:36   But then when I see, for example, a lot of people have said, "Oh, the Mac in Big Sur looks a lot more like the iPad."

00:47:43   But I, as somebody who's written a book about photos, like the sidebar in photos on the iPad,

00:47:48   I'm like, "I know where that came from." Right? That's learning lessons from the Mac and applying them to the iPad.

00:47:54   When you talk about that and you throw in Mac Catalyst, it definitely seems like

00:47:58   the Mac and the iPad are learning from each other more than ever.

00:48:02   Yeah, and I think people should expect that, right? And just go look at widgets, for example,

00:48:09   which are phenomenal, that are inspired by a lot of what we've learned with the watch

00:48:14   in terms of creating glanceable UIs and ways in which you can visually get access to information

00:48:19   very quickly and clearly. And so we want to take those learnings. But again, coming back to my previous point,

00:48:25   we want to do it in a way that is specific and authentic for the platform that we're designing for.

00:48:32   So it's not like, "Oh, that's a great feature. Let's just go copy paste it over here."

00:48:36   I mean, we haven't talked about it, but if you look at Control Center on the Mac,

00:48:40   obviously that's a construct that we've had elsewhere. But the way that we brought it to the Mac

00:48:45   is uniquely suited to the Mac. You can tear off controls and put them into the menu bar.

00:48:50   You can dive down and get more fine-grained controls. It is really well suited for the Mac.

00:48:57   If you look at Messages, a simple example, but yes, we've brought over great features from iOS 14,

00:49:04   like being able to pin conversations and having inline replies, and now you can edit Memoji

00:49:10   and those things. But we've also added keyboard shortcuts.

00:49:14   Multiple windows.

00:49:15   And yeah, Windows, exactly. Maps is a perfect example of that. Bring up three windows within

00:49:21   Maps. So you've got one for reading about the great guides for a location you're going to,

00:49:26   another one for the route, and another one for look around. What else, Ronik? What else comes to mind?

00:49:32   I mean, multiple windows. If you want to get really into the details, I mean, look at some of

00:49:36   the things that we've done with popovers in Messages so that you can get to all of these

00:49:40   new features. We've been able to use Catalyst to not only bring over new features that we

00:49:45   introduced in Messages on iOS this year, we were able to bring over features like effects

00:49:50   and the photo picker, Memoji stickers that people have been wanting for a really long time.

00:49:55   And we've been able to do that using Mac style controls, Mac style check boxes,

00:49:59   Mac style popovers that look and work great.

00:50:02   I've been wanting to see lasers and messages on my Mac for a while now,

00:50:05   so I'm very much looking forward to that. Is there a conversation, how does the conversation

00:50:09   work in terms of you've got teams working on the Mac who are bringing, for example, Messages and

00:50:14   Maps over using that Catalyst, new versions that are coming from the iPad using that Catalyst.

00:50:20   And there are also the people who are working on that Catalyst, on the tools that all developers

00:50:26   have to use to effect this move from iPad to the Mac. How does that work? Do those teams,

00:50:32   are they collaborating in a cycle, a development cycle like this? Are they collaborating all the

00:50:36   time? Does the Maps team call up the Catalyst team and say, "We really need to do this thing,

00:50:41   can you make this work for us?" I'm just curious how that conversation goes on because the truth

00:50:46   is that two major system apps on Mac OS are completely relying on that Catalyst now,

00:50:52   and so obviously Mac Catalyst needed to be capable of doing the job.

00:50:56   Yeah, and I think when we, you know, if you go back to when we introduced Mac Catalyst,

00:51:01   the goal was to be able to get people who had built amazing iPad apps and had that code base

00:51:07   to get them to come across to the Mac and be able to spend their time really finely tuning it for

00:51:13   the Mac experience. And in the intervening time, we have done nothing but listen to external and

00:51:19   internal developers as to the kinds of things that they wanted to have and felt would be most

00:51:25   useful and effective, and then have added that in. And if you look at this release of Mac Catalyst,

00:51:30   it's huge. I mean, the number of additional capabilities that have been added in is phenomenal,

00:51:36   and they can now take advantage of, you know, accessing essentially every pixel on the Mac,

00:51:41   they can take advantage of universal purchase, all of the controls that Ronik was talking about.

00:51:46   So that inspiration and that drive comes from wanting to have the best apps possible on the Mac

00:51:53   for developers coming from any direction, and that includes both the internal teams as well as the

00:51:59   external teams. It makes sense. Last year, I talked to a lot of developers who, because there was so

00:52:03   much enthusiasm over releasing SwiftUI, which is understandable, there was also this question of

00:52:09   sort of like, "Well, what about Mac Catalyst?" And sort of Mac Catalyst last year was making good on

00:52:13   the promise of the year before. So we're going back multiple WWDCs now. But I know that they all

00:52:18   had their lists, right, of, "Here are the things that I want Mac Catalyst to do," and that they

00:52:23   were all pretty enthusiastic because it is quite an endorsement. I was talking to somebody today

00:52:27   who said, "Well, when you see major Mac apps from Apple brought over on Mac Catalyst, it seems like

00:52:33   a pretty solid endorsement for using Mac Catalyst." So I think they're enthusiastic seeing Apple,

00:52:39   what Apple can do with messages and maps. Well, yeah, and I think the real proof point here is,

00:52:44   go use those two applications. And they are just phenomenal for all the reasons Ronik just

00:52:51   mentioned. And at the end of the day, we are one company, right? So the fact that this should be a

00:52:56   great combination of efforts and be the best representation of what you can do with Mac Catalyst

00:53:01   is what you should expect of us. What do you think are some of the key areas that developers

00:53:07   should be focusing on to make sure that their apps are going to look at home on Big Sur?

00:53:11   So there are a number of things that if they're using the modern frameworks built within Xcode

00:53:18   and within the operating system, if they're using the modern frameworks, they'll actually get a lot

00:53:22   of the pieces and the components for free, as it were. And they will get the standard treatments

00:53:28   and they'll have access to a number of the capabilities that we've been talking about that

00:53:34   will make Mac OS Big Sur really what it is. And I think one of the ones we were talking about earlier

00:53:39   is in fact the icon. We have provided some guidelines, some suggestions for how to fit

00:53:46   within kind of a standard framework, but then to be able to be creative within it. And I think it's

00:53:51   actually all you have to do is be a user and go look at your dock. You can almost sometimes gauge

00:53:58   when the app was last updated based on the modernity of its icon. And so I actually think

00:54:05   one of the things people should do is once they get their app incredibly performant and doing all

00:54:11   the things that you would want to, also go look and see, you know, what is your front door look

00:54:16   like? And does it represent kind of the visual approach and the treatment and the fresh way in

00:54:23   which we've created our own icons and think about how they want to be represented in that same format?

00:54:29   It's almost like marketing in a way as well, really, isn't it? Because as well, especially if

00:54:34   these apps are going to be in the Mac App Store, it will help them stand out, I'm sure. But it's

00:54:38   an important part of an application. It's the identity of the application in many ways.

00:54:44   Yeah, which is why, you know, going back to why we spent so much time thinking about the icons,

00:54:50   that has been, you know, for a long, long time, that has been such an important part of how you

00:54:55   represented what was inside this amazing application. And you need to approach it in a

00:55:02   thoughtful way because users are discerning. And you take a lot away from what you see in that

00:55:09   little rounded wreck that's sitting on the homepage.

00:55:13   Yeah, I have to own up to there being many apps that sometimes I feel like I can't use because of

00:55:18   the icon. It's the thing where like, I'm like, I don't know if I can keep clicking on this.

00:55:23   It's the icon shaming. I can't help it.

00:55:26   Actually, personality of apps goes beyond this. This just strikes me. One of the features in Big

00:55:32   Sur is this idea that apps can set their own kind of signature color. And so you can have,

00:55:39   user can say, I want to be in, you know, I want everything to be orange or blue or whatever,

00:55:44   but the default is this multicolor mode, which lets every app in addition to their icon and

00:55:49   everything else about them, lets them sort of have their color, which I think is a really

00:55:53   interesting little quirky thing about letting every app express itself. And that goes for

00:55:58   Apple's apps that are on the system, but it also goes for every third party app that they can say,

00:56:03   well, we are going to be bold and red, or we're going to be a light blue or whatever.

00:56:07   And it makes those apps potentially feel even more homey for lack of a better word,

00:56:13   like it's part of the app identity along with the icon.

00:56:17   Yeah. And, and I also think it serves a real functional purpose too, which is especially,

00:56:23   you know, today with the Mac being so powerful and us doing so many different things within the Mac

00:56:29   and having multiple windows up, one of the things you want to do is very quickly be able to figure

00:56:33   out which window you need to go to. And if you've got a little glimpse of color that you've kind of

00:56:38   put in the back of your head that, Oh, blue is male. It's, you know, it's a great cue that serves,

00:56:45   you know, not only a way I love the way you put it, you know, that shows off some of the personality

00:56:49   of the app, but it also serves a functional purpose so that I can go get that and recognize

00:56:54   it and kind of start to build some of the muscle memory it builds, you know, creates an order to

00:57:00   all these things. So, um, yeah, I'm excited to see how people are going to, how they're going to use

00:57:05   it and what it's going to start to look like. It's funny that you say about blue being male. I feel

00:57:09   like every third party mail app I've ever seen uses blue and white for its icon. And I'm sure

00:57:15   that that all goes back to the Apple standard mail app, right? Like that's where that comes from.

00:57:21   Yeah, yeah, no, they, yeah. And, and it is funny how that color memory is so, so strong for you.

00:57:27   Yeah. Okay. So we've got developers receiving betas a big sir. Now, um, Apple has announced

00:57:34   that there will be, as there have, has been the last few years, public beta forthcoming in July

00:57:39   beta cycle. Obviously it's for people who want to try the new stuff out before it's ready to go for

00:57:43   the masses. It's also a feedback cycle and every beta version comes with a feedback assistant.

00:57:48   What kind of feedback do you expect to get? And are you looking for as part of the beta

00:57:54   process, whether it's from users or developers and does that get incorporated? I think if they're,

00:57:59   what we see today in the developer release is not necessarily a done deal about the final release.

00:58:07   There's going to be stuff that Apple kind of learns and recognizes based on user feedback and adjusts

00:58:12   along the way. Right? So we spend a ton of time going through the feedback that we get. It's the

00:58:16   whole reason that we, we do the public data. We want people using it. Um, and we want to get

00:58:21   feedback from everything from technical bugs and issues to feedback on the features themselves.

00:58:27   And like I said, we have teams that spend a lot of time going through that feedback, identifying

00:58:33   things that we need to spend more time on, pay attention to, and that feedback ends up in the

00:58:39   final product. When we ship it in the fall, there are so many things that we've incorporated from

00:58:44   that, that helped make the release better. Um, and so, um, I, I can't remember when we started the

00:58:49   public doing public betas a few years ago, but it's been become a really important part of our

00:58:54   process as, as we develop the software and refine it in the final months before release.

00:58:58   So if something doesn't look right or doesn't make sense or doesn't work right,

00:59:02   they, for somebody using the beta, they need to get out that feedback assistant and send that

00:59:06   feedback to Apple because you've got people looking at that all summer. That's right. And

00:59:10   we want to hear about it. And we've actually made a lot of improvements to the feedback assistant

00:59:14   itself to make that process even easier so that it's really easy for users to send us that feedback

00:59:19   because that's incredibly valuable to us. We talked about Mac catalyst a little bit. I want

00:59:23   to at least bring this up. This is, this is a little, I mean, it's big, sir, but it's,

00:59:26   it's slightly tangential as well, which is one of the announcements that I don't think a lot of us

00:59:31   expected in the keynote was the idea that in addition to iPad app developers being able to

00:59:37   bring their apps to the Mac using that catalyst, that on Apple Silicon apps that are for iPhone and

00:59:43   iPad will be able to run natively inside Mac OS, which is it's surprising. It's interesting.

00:59:51   I'm curious if you have any thoughts about sort of like how you view an app that's, you know,

00:59:57   running in big Sur that's a Mac native developed using app kit versus something developed using

01:00:04   that catalyst versus something that we're now going to have another class of apps, which are

01:00:08   things coming over from the app store. How does that work? How does that look? And do you think,

01:00:16   you know, how do users react to that? Yeah. Wow. A lot to unpack in one question.

01:00:20   It was a big, it was a big moment. Yeah. It was, it was definitely a surprise and almost,

01:00:25   and it was a mind blowing moment. I was like, oh, okay, we're doing that too. Great.

01:00:29   Well, and I think, you know, just pulling back a second, if you look at it within the broader,

01:00:34   the broader context, our goal with any transition, and especially with this upcoming transition to

01:00:40   max with Apple Silicon, we want to make it seamless for developers and seamless for users,

01:00:47   but we really want to start first with the developer community. And that's why it was

01:00:51   really important for us to talk about Rosetta too, and all of the amazing capabilities there as a

01:00:57   transitional technology while you're getting your app ready to become a universal binary. So

01:01:02   as a universal binary, you know, which you can generate in Xcode 12, you have one single file

01:01:10   that you can distribute that will run on both Intel based max, as well as max with Apple Silicon,

01:01:15   and be able to kind of take that out to people that way. You saw all of the great additions to,

01:01:20   to catalyst for people to be able to take their iPadOS or iOS code base and, and move that in.

01:01:27   And on top of that, because we will have a, with Apple Silicon, we'll have a unified silicon

01:01:32   platform. We can also look at doing things like bringing those apps that are running on iOS or

01:01:39   iPadOS over to the Mac. And what's great about it is that there will be, there'll be a class of apps

01:01:45   where the developer doesn't necessarily know yet whether to go invest the time in developing a Mac

01:01:51   version, but they want to get, give their users access to the capability and creativity. And so

01:01:58   they opt into, to putting their, their app into the Mac app store. And by the way, this is all

01:02:03   within the developer's control, right? They get to decide whether or not the, the app goes there,

01:02:08   but then once it goes there, the user can, has access to it in the same way that they would on

01:02:15   iOS or iPadOS, the developer can learn a ton and they can decide, okay, hey, maybe it's time for

01:02:21   me to then go invest the time and let's use Mac catalyst to get it into, you know, into becoming

01:02:27   more of a native Mac app. And let me start to build out that functionality because I see what

01:02:31   people are doing with it. So we just think, you know, for, for developers, it's going to be a

01:02:36   phenomenal way to extend the number of people that can make use of the creative work that they've

01:02:41   done. And also enriching kind of the, the Mac ecosystem. So people can, can have access to some

01:02:48   of the things that are going on on the other platforms. So, you know, at the end of the day,

01:02:53   what's really important to us is that across all of these dimensions, that this transition is kind

01:02:57   of seamless for both developers and, and, and users. And that's going to, you know, continue

01:03:03   to be the focus as we move forward. Well, the fact is I, so I use an iPad primarily when I'm

01:03:08   traveling and I think about what if I was using a Mac laptop and there are certain iPad apps that

01:03:13   I would really miss that aren't Mac apps. And I think about this scenario and I think, well,

01:03:17   now I can run those apps too. And then maybe eventually there'll be something that gets

01:03:22   brought over to catalyst. I also, there are lots of places in my current Mac experience where

01:03:26   the answer is we have an iOS app. And if you're on a Mac, you just need to use our website.

01:03:32   And I love Safari. I already said it, but you know what? I love apps more than I love web pages.

01:03:38   And I can see some of those, I could just really see the benefit, especially the ones that are

01:03:44   using flash, which is going to be deprecated in December, the benefit of being able to say,

01:03:49   Oh, I don't have to run that lousy website anymore. I can run their iPhone app or their iPad app,

01:03:54   which is way better. So for me part of this is the opportunity to move some stuff where I've got

01:04:02   kicked to a lousy website. And instead I get to use a great app that, that works, but that works

01:04:07   for me. Yeah. And that's a great example, Jason, because it's, you know, there's real utility that

01:04:13   you want to make use of. And sometimes these apps are coming from small development shops where they

01:04:18   don't have a lot of time, but what in this process they'll come over and they'll have provided that

01:04:24   they've been using kind of modern frameworks, they'll have, you know, great native Mac capabilities

01:04:30   along with them. So it won't, you won't feel like you're having to, you know, settle for something.

01:04:34   It'll be like, Oh my gosh, this is just, it it's magic that this just happened. So yeah, we think

01:04:39   it's going to be a great part of the, of the overall story as we begin the transition to

01:04:45   Macs with Apple Silicon. Yeah. For people who don't, who didn't notice the file system stuff

01:04:49   is the part that made me sit up and take notice where, you know, you open a file in an iPad app

01:04:55   and you're opening your files on your Mac. It's just, it just kind of happens. And that's a

01:05:00   beautiful thing because then you don't end up in a weird space where you're like, wait a second,

01:05:04   how can I open files if I'm not on an iPad? It just shows you your files on your Mac.

01:05:09   It's nice. I like it. Yep. Glad, glad you appreciate it.

01:05:12   In so many ways, like so many of the ways that we've touched on, Big Sur really does feel like

01:05:18   Mac OS for now and the future. And I'm very excited about it myself. I couldn't agree more.

01:05:25   And I think I'm just excited for, for folks to be able to, to get access to Big Sur and start to

01:05:32   explore it and see all of these kind of layers of, of story and technology and the fact that in,

01:05:39   you know, it just works the way that you would expect it to. I think it's really a powerful

01:05:43   representation as you, as you say about, you know, today, tomorrow, the future. And like I said,

01:05:49   appropriately named Big Sur. Bob Ronach, I really, really want to thank you for both spending some

01:05:55   time of upgrade today. It's been absolutely wonderful to get your insight and your thoughts on

01:05:59   everything that you've got going on at the moment. Thank you. It's been, uh, there's a lot in dub dub

01:06:04   this year and we really appreciate you guys investing the time to kind of unpack it with us.

01:06:09   Thank you for having us. Yeah, it was a big week, wasn't it?

01:06:12   It feels like it's been multiple weeks. You're telling us.

01:06:18   This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Pingdom from SolarWinds. Today's internet users

01:06:26   expect a fast experience, no matter how good your content, how effective your marketing is.

01:06:31   If your website's loading too slowly or not loading at all, they're going to leave.

01:06:35   With real user monitoring from Pingdom, you can discover how website performance issues are

01:06:40   affecting your visitors experiences. So you're able to take action on them before your business

01:06:44   is impacted. Even sometimes before people even find out there's an issue. How your visitors are

01:06:49   experiencing your website will differ depending on the browser they're using, the device they're

01:06:53   using and the platform that they're using. So you want to identify how visitors are experiencing

01:06:58   your website so you can make informed optimizations and deliver great performance to those who matter

01:07:03   most to you, your customers. Real user monitoring is an event based solution. So it's built for

01:07:07   scalability, meaning you can monitor millions of page views without ever compromising the fidelity

01:07:12   of your historical data or breaking the bank in the process, which is really important. Get live

01:07:17   visitor insights today with real user monitoring from Pingdom. Go to Pingdom.com/RelayFM right now

01:07:23   for a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. Then when you sign up, use the code

01:07:29   "upgrade" at checkout to get an amazing 30% off your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom

01:07:34   from SolarWinds for their support of this show and RelayFM. That was really great, wasn't it,

01:07:40   Jason? That interview? Yeah, it was great to talk to them and try to get some tidbits here and there

01:07:46   while we're also getting there. I find a lot of this, obviously they've got their marketing

01:07:50   details that they're getting across, but I like hearing from actual human beings who work at Apple

01:07:55   and getting their take. Sometimes it's not about the details, but it's about the philosophy. It's

01:08:03   sort of like, well, we think that this is, and so like asking them about running iOS and iPad apps

01:08:07   on a Mac. That's the kind of thing where you can get maybe a little sense of how Apple's approaching

01:08:13   it from that, which I think is very helpful. So I'm very appreciative of those guys to take the

01:08:18   time and sit down with us virtually from Apple Park. Yeah, and what was a very busy week for them,

01:08:23   I'm sure. So like having people available to talk to us was great. And I'm really thankful for the

01:08:30   many, many, many people that were involved in making that happen. These things are quite a

01:08:35   production and I'm really happy that everything was able to come together. Yep. Now, Jason had a

01:08:41   great idea for a topic today that we're going to talk about now. But when Jason was telling me

01:08:46   about this topic, I thought to myself, this feels a little more than our usual topic. This feels

01:08:53   quite fun. Now, if you're new to upgrade, every summer things start to get a little slower in the

01:09:00   news department. So we say to ourselves, and we said many years ago, we thought we would start

01:09:05   coming up with some topics that aren't necessarily news related, aren't necessarily reporting about

01:09:12   things. But we have a little bit more fun with them than we usually do. So we're doing something

01:09:17   that nobody was expecting us to do, including ourselves right now. And we are transitioning

01:09:22   right now into the summer of fun. Summer of fun! It is happening in the middle of an episode.

01:09:28   And the summer of fun is now going to take us all the way through with some cool vibes and

01:09:32   fun vibes all the way through to maybe September, maybe October. Who knows? Summer of fun is right

01:09:39   now. The calendar, the summer of fun cannot be limited. It goes until it's done and then it

01:09:45   leaves us and we can't control it. So what are we going to talk about for our first summer of fun

01:09:50   segment this year, Jason Snow? Well, I wanted to do this and I didn't want to wait because I think

01:09:56   everybody's going to be talking about it. So it just, again, the summer of fun forced its hand and

01:10:00   said, "I must happen now." We are going to build the Apple Silicon Mac. Oh, this is quite an

01:10:10   important job we found ourselves taking care of here. Yeah, well, somebody's got to do it and

01:10:16   it's going to be us because Apple, the only people doing it right now are at Apple and they're not

01:10:20   talking. So we're going to do it. The premise here is that, so back in the Intel transition,

01:10:25   15 years ago, Apple just released the same Mac designs it had before. It was like a

01:10:30   trying to send a message of stability, right? It's like, it's okay. It's still an iMac. It just has

01:10:34   an Intel processor in it now. And I feel like based on what we learned last week, this feels

01:10:39   different. I'm starting to get this sneaking suspicion that Apple has been holding on to a lot

01:10:45   of features because why implement that and go through like all the trouble of implementing this

01:10:49   on the current hardware when they already have built it for iPad and iPhone and they could just

01:10:54   move it over once they're on Apple Silicon. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we'll see that we could

01:11:01   be wrong here, but I think it's worth pondering what would, what Apple may have in reserve to

01:11:08   roll out starting toward the end of this year in terms of new features and designs that are powered

01:11:15   by Apple finally controlling the whole system on a chip and what they might bring in from the iPhone

01:11:23   and the iPad. This is not a draft, but I think we could alternate and come up with whatever ones we

01:11:30   think are most interesting and do it that way. So it gives it feels a little like a draft, but it's

01:11:34   not a draft because it's not a competition. We're just having fun listing things.

01:11:37   - A collaborative draft as you will. So yeah, I think this is a good idea. And I like your

01:11:43   setup here because I think you're right. I think there's probably a combination of things going on

01:11:47   here. It could be a case of now that the fact that Apple are making their own chips, it's like

01:11:52   there's stuff that they know how to do better if they're controlling it or things that are just way

01:11:58   easier for them to do. So like they're going to get some features that like just wouldn't be easy

01:12:03   for them to do while choosing Intel because it requires a lot of other hardware and a lot of

01:12:07   other chip design. But now that they're doing it on their own, it's like, well, we already have all

01:12:12   these features in our iOS devices. We know how to do that. Let's do it. But also the idea of like

01:12:17   if you have some really cool features on the way, don't blow them maybe. There's always,

01:12:24   so you think about Apple, right? And we've just spoken to people. Marketing and product

01:12:29   are intertwined there. And that is important to consider how sometimes there may be a decision

01:12:36   that they make, which is a product decision, a feature decision, but they make it at the right

01:12:40   time because the marketing story fits, right? And that can go in both ways, but sometimes they

01:12:46   might make tough decisions earlier than they need to because they want it for marketing reasons,

01:12:52   right? So getting rid of 32-bit apps in Catalina may have been because when the max silicon stuff

01:13:00   comes around, well, they can't run 32-bit apps anymore. So do that earlier than you need to.

01:13:06   So you can clear the decks and focus on what you want to for later on when you need it, right?

01:13:13   Kind of follow what I'm saying? So let's talk about some of these features. Should we go in

01:13:20   almost like draft style, but we have a little list here. Let's talk about them.

01:13:23   Yeah, I think we're making a list by alternating, but it's not a draft. Exactly.

01:13:27   So one of the things that lots of people have wanted and they haven't done yet,

01:13:31   and I think will be made easier by Apple kind of controlling the whole stack more,

01:13:36   is a cellular modem in a Mac or in a Mac laptop especially. I can imagine this stuff being way

01:13:43   easier for Apple to be able to produce when they're in control of the whole thing,

01:13:47   because the chips that they make already integrate or have integrated modems in them,

01:13:53   and Apple is continuing to move forward with future like 5G and stuff like that. Developing

01:14:00   stuff on their own is something we've heard a lot of, right? And they acquired a bunch of stuff that

01:14:04   they would need. They acquired Intel's chip business, right? Yeah, they bought Intel's modem

01:14:09   business. It's true. So I can imagine a future Mac laptop—I can't imagine the desktops getting them,

01:14:18   but—future Mac laptop having integrated LTE or 5G. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think

01:14:25   it would make a lot of people happy. My gut feeling here is that since they're still

01:14:29   currently using Qualcomm stuff, it's not going to happen in the short term, but once they are

01:14:34   making their own cellular modem silicon, then I think it gets much more probable that they will

01:14:42   do it. My question has been all along, you know, why not make cellular Macs? Why not do it? Why

01:14:49   not just sell it for an extra 130 bucks or whatever and put it in there? And some of it is maybe the

01:14:55   OS isn't really built to think about that traffic that way, and they would need to make some OS

01:15:00   changes. But I remain frustrated that Apple doesn't let laptop users have the same option that iPad

01:15:08   users have for cellular because I love having cellular on my iPad, and I would not go back.

01:15:12   So I would really like laptop users to be able to do that. And yes, you can tether and stuff

01:15:18   like that. It's not as good as just popping a SIM card in and paying—in my case, I pay an extra

01:15:24   $10 a month or something, and my iPad is just—if I'm somewhere without Wi-Fi, it just gives me data

01:15:29   and it's fine. And I love it. It's the best. -What do you want to go with? -Oh, I am going to go with

01:15:37   ProMotion displays. This is something that we've had on iOS devices, and it's delightful. The

01:15:48   high resolution, you know, high screen rate of refresh makes smoothing super—like scrolling

01:15:54   super smooth and pleasant. Like, the Mac just doesn't do high frame rate right now, and iOS

01:16:04   devices do, and I want that on the Mac. -Well, just the iPad. -Well, just—yeah, I know, but

01:16:08   although the iPhone should do it too. The iPhone needs ProMotion, right? We've talked about that.

01:16:12   So the iPad does it now, and I love it, and whenever I use an iPad that doesn't have it,

01:16:16   I think, "Oh, oh no." Like, oh no, that's not—like, you can really tell. It seems so small,

01:16:22   and yet it's actually really delightful, and why not do that on the Mac? You know, it's akin to,

01:16:27   like, taking Retina to the Mac. Why would you not take ProMotion to the Mac as well? -Because I

01:16:32   think that high refresh rate screens and displays, they're starting to become table stakes in the

01:16:38   technology industry, and this is reminding me of Retina, but it's taken them longer to do it. So

01:16:44   this is a big screen technology. Apple had it for multiple years on the iPad Pro. I think that this

01:16:49   year it's going to come to the iPhone, at least at the Pro. Maybe the whole line, but probably the

01:16:54   Pro for sure. Why not put it on the Mac as well? Because then, you know, ProMotion becomes a new

01:17:01   part of the Retina display kind of package, right? Maybe they will rebrand it to include it in

01:17:07   Retina some way. You've got, like, the liquid Retina display and all those names that they've

01:17:12   given the displays over time, and it feels like that this is going to become a technology that

01:17:17   people are going to start expecting more and more and more devices, and it would be, you know,

01:17:23   I've seen people saying, like, the Mac can support it if you have a high refresh monitor. Like,

01:17:30   it can look really good. I've seen a lot of people talking about that kind of stuff on Twitter

01:17:33   recently, so it'd be really wonderful to see Apple build this into their products. Maybe that new

01:17:39   iMac or maybe that screen that we all hope will come will be a high refresh rate monitor, as well

01:17:44   as the laptops. We'll see. I want to pick something that's near and dear to my heart is Apple Pencil

01:17:50   support, especially in the laptops. There's some other stuff that we're going to talk about in a

01:17:56   little bit which could enable this and may enable this to work well, but I think it would be

01:18:01   wonderful to see the Apple Pencil expand into other devices and really kind of, like, solidify

01:18:09   as an input method, as an artist tool, as a notebook, as a meeting note tool as it's becoming.

01:18:15   I think it would be really great to see it not just be an iPad feature anymore. You know,

01:18:20   it started as an iPad Pro feature, then became across the entire product line for iPad,

01:18:26   and like promotion, let's start breaking that outside of just from one device. Let's make

01:18:32   the Apple Pencil as important to Apple as a trackpad is, you know? I think that would

01:18:36   be really wonderful to see. Yeah, now obviously there are going to be some ergonomic issues there,

01:18:41   but we're going to, I suspect, deal with that before we get come to the end of the list.

01:18:44   But I definitely think that Apple Pencil support should be there. So one of the motivators of doing

01:18:49   this is looking at the Big Sur design, which sort of rounds everything and spaces everything out a

01:18:56   little bit more. Menu items are spaced out more. The menu bar is taller. There is definitely this

01:19:01   feeling that it feels like they're trying to make it a more acceptable interface for touch than the

01:19:09   Mac has been before. And then you throw in the fact that Apple Silicon Macs are going to be able to run

01:19:13   apps from iPad and iPhone that were built for touch. And while they will probably work okay

01:19:21   with a pointer in many cases, not necessarily in all cases, and while the Mac is always going to be,

01:19:28   I believe, a keyboard and pointer-driven interface primarily, with the iPad what we've seen is you

01:19:34   can have a touch primary device that also does Apple Pencil and also does keyboard and mouse

01:19:41   or trackpad. So I am going to say it. I get the sneaking suspicion that we're gonna,

01:19:47   that I would even say all Apple Silicon Macs may be touch screen Macs, that this is the time when

01:19:54   they do this. And the reason is because it's not the primary, but it can be very nice to reach up

01:20:01   to your screen and scroll something. And then you're gonna have some apps on there that are

01:20:05   built primarily for touch that will work better if you can reach up and touch them.

01:20:10   I think that, I know like people have had lots of opinions on this over time. Apple have spread

01:20:19   their feelings on this over time. I think many years ago on an episode of the talk show at WWDC,

01:20:26   I think Phil Schiller kind of referenced it as like monster arms, like holding your arms out and

01:20:30   touching devices. Zombie arms. The zombie arms. That argument is gone now because of the iPad Pro.

01:20:36   The iPad Pro is as much a laptop in its design now and the way that Apple markets and sells the thing

01:20:41   as any other laptop that Apple makes. So the idea of thinking that a touch screen shouldn't be in

01:20:47   that form factor is wrong. Now if we're looking at desktop Macs, that becomes trickier to put

01:20:54   touch screens there. Like my iMac Pro as far away as it is from me right now, I don't know if I

01:20:59   would want to be reaching up and touching that, but any laptop, yeah, I would want to be able to

01:21:03   do that in the same way that I want to be able to sometimes to do that on my iPad Pro when I have it

01:21:08   with my magic keyboard on. Most of the time I use the trackpad, but sometimes I'm reading an article,

01:21:12   I'll just reach out and swipe, or I just don't have that moment broken in my brain where I just

01:21:18   reach out and instinctively touch a thing and nothing happens, right, which happens to me more

01:21:22   and more when I use Mac laptops now. So enabling that functionality would be nice. I think that

01:21:28   the future of computer users, like younger people now, expect touch screens and they're not on Macs,

01:21:35   but they are on the rest of the PC industry. They're baffled by the fact that Macs don't

01:21:40   support this. And for people who are like, "Oh no, Apple said they won't do it, so therefore it will

01:21:45   never happen," I will point out two things, one of which is the iPad has a keyboard and a mouse with

01:21:49   a cursor, and the Apple Pencil is a thing when there was that famous line about "If you see a

01:21:55   stylus, they blew it," which was not about this quite because it was about primary input method,

01:22:00   which is really sort of the point. So Apple adding touchscreen to Macs, they're going to say,

01:22:05   "Well, now is the time," and it makes sense because it's the typical Apple thing, right? Well,

01:22:10   we didn't before because it wasn't any good, but now that we did it, it's good. That's what they do.

01:22:14   - And also, like the bigger thing which you mentioned, the biggest argument is,

01:22:18   "Just look at Big Sur," and you'll see that that is designed for touching.

01:22:24   - Yeah, look at Big Sur and ponder the fact that a bunch of touch apps are going to run on Macs,

01:22:28   Silicon Macs, and then tell me that they're not going to do it.

01:22:31   - Because there's been a lot of people saying, "If an app needs multi-touch,

01:22:37   how will that work if I only have a mouse?"

01:22:41   - Yeah, yeah. I was listening to a podcast, I think it might have been ATP, where they were

01:22:46   talking about this, or maybe it was connected, and I immediately was like, "Well, you'll just

01:22:50   reach up to the screen for that." That's the answer. You'll reach up to the screen.

01:22:54   And people are like, "Well, what about current Macs?" But current Macs don't do this.

01:23:01   This is for Apple Silicon Macs, so it's no existing Macs. Running these apps is a feature

01:23:07   that doesn't exist on the older hardware, the Intel hardware, but the new hardware all supports it,

01:23:15   so it makes sense that that's the dividing line.

01:23:17   - Now, my next point. I don't know what I think about this, but I would be intrigued to see it,

01:23:24   which would be some kind of wild hinge design from Apple.

01:23:28   - Yeah.

01:23:28   - So if they're gonna put touchscreen on it, if they're gonna put Apple Pencil support on it,

01:23:34   would Apple ever consider making a two-in-one Mac? Now, the idea of you take the screen,

01:23:40   flip it all the way around to the other side, and you kind of now have it as a tablet,

01:23:44   I don't know how I feel about this one, because that feels like it might be pushing into iPad

01:23:49   land too much, but if they could come up with something really cool from a design perspective,

01:23:55   like an industrial design perspective, maybe they'd do it.

01:23:58   - Yeah, I think the rule that I'm going by is Apple is not going to push one shape group into

01:24:10   another area, if that makes sense. So iPad owns the "I'm a standalone." People are like, "Are they

01:24:16   gonna make a Mac Surface that doesn't have anything, and then you attach a keyboard to it?"

01:24:19   And I would say no, they're not, because that's the iPad. That's what the iPad is. Likewise,

01:24:23   I think Apple's not gonna make an iPad laptop now, because iPad doesn't go into laptops,

01:24:28   there's already a laptop and it's the Mac. Convertible is interesting, but I think if

01:24:32   you define a Mac as being something with a keyboard attached to it, and it's a keyboard

01:24:37   primary device, the idea that they might make one where you can fold the keyboard back, maybe not

01:24:42   take it off, but fold it back or turn it around or do something that makes a convertible, like a PC

01:24:47   laptop convertible or two-in-one, maybe with some unique features of Apple's design that we don't

01:24:52   anticipate, kind of like that magic keyboard for iPad was not quite what we thought it would be,

01:24:56   some clever little things they do, that I could see, because keep in mind, if there's a touch

01:25:02   screen on an Apple Silicon laptop, that means it's running basically all iPad apps. And at that point,

01:25:10   when you fold that keyboard back, you could treat it like an iPad, and it's an iPad, and then you

01:25:15   fold the keyboard back around, and now it's a Mac again. I think that could work. I don't know

01:25:21   whether they're going to do it either, but it's certainly an option for them, is to generate

01:25:25   these laptops that don't act like today's laptops because they've got the touch interface,

01:25:32   and they've got all of those iPhone and iPad apps that are running. And you get people then saying,

01:25:37   and I'm sure there are many people screaming at their podcast player right now and saying,

01:25:40   "But that would kill the iPad!" But I don't think it would, because that is going to be an okay

01:25:49   tablet experience. It's not exactly a good one. It's going to be thick. It's a laptop that can

01:25:54   kind of behave like a touch device in certain circumstances, just like the iPad right now is a

01:26:01   touch device that can behave like a laptop in certain circumstances. So it becomes, it already

01:26:09   is, but even more so it becomes what's your priority. And I heard from a lot of people

01:26:14   last week who said, "Okay, well, will Jason buy a laptop and start using a Mac laptop again because

01:26:20   it'll run iPad apps?" And my answer is probably no, because the thing that I actually like the

01:26:25   most is that the iPad is primarily a touch tablet that's very light and that I can connect a keyboard

01:26:32   to, and I don't anticipate that a Mac laptop is going to be that. But for some people,

01:26:36   the Mac laptop, a lot of people are like, "I tried the iPad, but it just doesn't work for me. It's

01:26:41   just not." Like those people, it might be perfect to have something that is primarily a laptop,

01:26:47   but can become an okay tablet when you want it to be, and then it goes back to being a laptop

01:26:53   the rest of the time. I'm intrigued by this product idea that we've created. Yeah, so let me

01:27:02   extend the ergonomics since we're talking about ergonomic stuff. The other place that this goes

01:27:08   is the iMac design with something that's more like the Surface Studio. If you've got a touch

01:27:17   screen Apple Pencil iMac, how does that work? And I think Microsoft has already showed us that

01:27:22   the way that works is by having it be supremely adjustable. And I think this is another one of

01:27:29   those engineering challenges for Apple that Apple might delight in doing. It might also be something

01:27:34   that reminds us a little bit more of the G4 iMac, where there's a base and then there's also the

01:27:42   floating thing. I don't know whether the computer's in the base or in the screen, but if you've looked

01:27:47   at that Surface Studio product, it's really interesting ergonomically because it can sit

01:27:52   up like an iPad, but you can also drop it down right in front of you and then use touch or use

01:27:58   a stylus and go into kind of a pen input mode or a touch input mode. And if the Mac supports touch

01:28:09   and runs iPad apps, plus, you know, Photoshop and things like that that support pen events today,

01:28:15   like that's a really compelling thing. And then you just pop it up and it's a computer again,

01:28:22   like a traditional computer again. I think that that could be amazing, but you need to have all

01:28:27   these other pieces. We're getting ourselves excited now, but Jason, this, all of this makes me like

01:28:32   really excited about the Mac again. I knew we'd find a way. I knew we'd find a way, Myke.

01:28:38   Look again, like I don't, I don't mean to be mean, right? Like it's not all like to say that the Mac

01:28:48   is, is boring. Just my tastes, what I'm interested in has changed over time. And for me personally,

01:28:58   the Mac feels like it's just kind of been what it is. And I like new and the iPad has continued

01:29:07   to be new and do new things. And it's added new peripherals, new ways of interacting with a

01:29:14   computer like, and I've been very intrigued by that and excited by that. And I would really love

01:29:21   to get this stuff that we're talking about today in a Mac, because then I'm going to be like really

01:29:26   excited about the Mac again. And I'm, I would like that, you know, the way I've been thinking of it

01:29:33   is Apple has spent the last decade plus building a brand new platform. And with the iPad

01:29:43   figuring out new ways of doing things that the Mac figured out in 1984, but like the modern way

01:29:51   of doing that to some success and some not success. And when you look at all of the features that we've

01:29:57   listed and some more that we'll talk about here, one of the things, the sense I get, and maybe some

01:30:02   of this is wishful thinking, but the sense I get is what's happening now is Apple saying,

01:30:10   now that we've built this platform up to this level, we can bring this stuff to the Mac.

01:30:15   Now that we've got our own chips in there, and we're confident that our chips are going to be

01:30:19   good enough to meet all the demands of the Mac, we're going to now be able to bring all that stuff

01:30:24   over that we've been running on this other platform. And the Mac gets that stuff too.

01:30:28   And that's what I really hope happens is that one of the reasons the Mac has been kind of meandering

01:30:33   for the last few years is they were treating it as a legacy platform. And then they had a change

01:30:38   where they thought, no, we're going to bring the Mac in. The way the Mac survives is not by not

01:30:44   changing and just sort of sitting out there because it's going to die. Instead, we're going to bring

01:30:48   it in and it's going to share so much with our other platforms. Also, Apple's not that big a

01:30:53   company in terms of people, and maintaining two completely separate operating system platforms is

01:30:58   not great. So now the less of that they need to do the better, the Mac becomes a superset of iPad and

01:31:04   iPhone features. So that's why I'm excited too, is that I do think this is the opportunity for all

01:31:12   these things that they've invented over the last 10 years to get poured back into the Mac. Why do

01:31:16   it? I mean, some of them they've done with the T2 processor, right? There's stuff that they were

01:31:20   like, okay, we'll do this. We're going to build our own custom chip and bypass Intel stuff. But

01:31:24   I feel like there's a lot of stuff they left on the table because, like perhaps what you're about

01:31:30   to say, because sort of like, well, let's just wait. Let's just wait and we'll do this when we

01:31:36   control the whole thing, which we don't right now. I would like to see Face ID find its way to the

01:31:42   Mac. Yeah. Along with better webcams in general, just I'll throw one in there as a side note.

01:31:47   But Face ID would be fantastic on the Mac. As we said, since we first saw it, it feels like

01:31:54   an inevitability. It's just a case of Apple being able to build the technology inside of

01:32:00   the screens, which are very thin screens, right? Now, I don't know how much space they actually

01:32:05   need for the Face ID stuff in general, but I would really, really love to see them do that.

01:32:10   And if it's a touch screen, touch screens may actually have to have a little bit more thickness

01:32:15   too. So it might be one of these things that it goes along with adding a touch screen is adding

01:32:19   a better webcam. But you're right. The webcams need to be better. Windows PCs have had essentially

01:32:23   Face ID in some form for ages now, it seems. Windows Hello, exactly. And maybe Apple's

01:32:30   implementation may be better and it may be different and maybe more secure, whatever.

01:32:33   But it's still a similar technology. They're using IR, right? So like, you know,

01:32:37   we think everything else is just how it's processed. And I love Touch ID on laptops,

01:32:43   but I use a desktop every day and I would love for Face ID to work on an iMac, right? Like,

01:32:51   because I work on an iMac every day and it's not something that they can add outside.

01:32:55   For security reasons, they really can't add it, I think, outside the box. And even then you'd have

01:33:01   to use like their keyboard or something like that. I use an Apple Watch for that, which is nice,

01:33:05   but I think Face ID is a logical thing. And yes, the webcams need to be better across the board.

01:33:12   I'll throw in a little minor thing. I think we've only got a couple more here. Mine is a little

01:33:18   minor thing that if you look, developers have been talking about this this week, this past week,

01:33:23   there are some new things that you do when you're building Mac apps that involve checking for a safe

01:33:30   area, which is like, well, why is there a safe area? And the answer is they are totally going

01:33:37   to curve the edges of the Mac screen like they do it on the iPad. Every piece of UI that they have

01:33:42   built in Big Sur has to be curved. And if you put a curved window up against a sharp corner,

01:33:49   what's the point of that? Yeah, so I think that that is, I think they're going to take all of the

01:33:54   edges around that. And you know, the original Mac had curved edges, curved little corners.

01:33:59   So it's also harkening back to the old days, but I think it's just, it's very hard to imagine that

01:34:04   they won't. I was looking at my iPad Pro just this morning and thinking, oh yeah, that's totally what

01:34:08   they're going to do. They're going to, and it's a little thing. It's just a little thing, but I

01:34:12   think they're going to do it. Yeah. Curved screen edges. And we're talking about like,

01:34:16   if you look at an iPad, the actual UI, the operating system is curved. It's not,

01:34:23   the corner doesn't meet in a sharp point like it does on the Mac. That feels modern now because

01:34:28   that's what our iOS devices do. Your iPhone has curved edges on it too. So that feels like what

01:34:34   you see in a modern computer now. And even though, as you say, it goes all the way back to the

01:34:41   beginning of the Mac, it may be time to see curved edges coming back to Mac displays.

01:34:46   The last one I want to mention is just no more tapers. Like thin designs, but like flat edges

01:34:56   and stuff like that. The iPad, you know, we've been talking about this, the iPad Pro design language.

01:35:03   I would like to see the iPad Pro design language also brought to the laptops.

01:35:07   All the things. iPad Pro, all the things. Flat edge design. Um, I think that will look

01:35:12   really cool. Uh, I want different industrial design across these new laptops as well,

01:35:19   which I think Apple is going to do. I think every Apple Silicon Mac, except for the Mac Pro,

01:35:26   won't look like the Macs they're replacing. Yeah. I wonder about the MacBook Air only

01:35:32   because they have, they got beat up about that. And so they brought back a new computer that

01:35:39   looks just like the old MacBook Air. You can just call it the new MacBook Air. I think the

01:35:42   problem was they just didn't have a MacBook Air anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. I, I,

01:35:47   I hope so. I'm not sure how, whether they're capable of completely redesigning every single

01:35:52   product, but then again, they have, they have kept these products looking the same for a long time.

01:35:58   Yes. And again, this is the thing is maybe it's wishful thinking, but I look at this moment and

01:36:03   I think this is what they've been doing the last couple of years. They've been turning over the Mac

01:36:07   in the background, but they couldn't ship any of it because it all had, was predicated on the Apple

01:36:13   Silicon. And that was the moment. And that we're going to just see them doing this. I,

01:36:17   I hope that's what it is. I hope that's true because I will say as exciting as the Apple

01:36:22   Silicon stuff is, if we're here in a year and the Macs that are being sold by Apple are essentially

01:36:27   the same Macs they're being sold now, except without Apple Silicon, I will be disappointed

01:36:32   because these are not just wishlist items because we're fun and you know, it's exciting and it's the

01:36:38   summer of fun. It's also, these are things we want that Apple makes on other products and it should

01:36:43   be on the Mac too. We haven't picked anything here except for maybe some of the ergonomic stuff,

01:36:50   like the way that they're not doing in other places. But even then they're still doing really

01:36:56   interesting ergonomics on the iPad with like the magic keyboard, right? That cantilevered hinge,

01:37:02   like that's wild from a design perspective. So I don't feel like anything we've said here is like

01:37:08   real pie in the sky type stuff. These all feel possible. I want to see how much they'll do.

01:37:15   The last thing I'll mention, this is not on the list, but I want to just gauge your interest in

01:37:18   this. We talk about new design. What do you think about new names? Yeah, I, I don't know. I mean,

01:37:25   I think I, I could see it, but I think that maybe that's a bridge too far and that the slots are

01:37:32   fairly well named and you know, I could see them doing a new consumer laptop name. I feel like the

01:37:39   iMac has so much cache now. It would be very hard to make something that wasn't the iMac.

01:37:44   I did suggest at some point that maybe they could retire MacBook Pro and call it like

01:37:49   PowerBook or something like that, because that's a fun name that they retired and they could bring

01:37:53   back because MacBook Pro is a mouthful. I think if they got rid of Mac, they just replace it with

01:37:59   Apple. And I don't think they're going to call them Apple books. Yeah. So I, and I think Mac is

01:38:06   going to be in every name because I think they've just decided that that's a thing. Although,

01:38:10   you know, I, I don't know, I guess it's possible, but if I had to bet, I would bet that they won't

01:38:15   because the, by redesigning them, if they truly redesigned them, they want to reassure you of what,

01:38:22   you know, what kind of animal is this? Right. It's like, I know it looks, it's shaped a little

01:38:25   different, but it's still a zebra, right? Like I think they want to be like, I know it's different,

01:38:30   but it's still an iMac. This is the iMac. It's just the next one. And that's the advantage.

01:38:34   If they had renamed the iMac when they went to the iMac G4 or to the Intel iMac or something

01:38:40   like that, it would be like, Oh, here's a new computer. That's kind of like the iMac. And

01:38:43   instead by calling it the iMac, you're like, no, it's just the new iMac. It changes shape,

01:38:47   but it's still an iMac. And you know what that means. So I think that that's the trick is you

01:38:51   change the shape, but keep the name so that there's some continuity happening. That was a

01:38:56   great way to start the summer of fun, Jason. I agree. I'm glad it came early this year. We need

01:39:02   some fun, right? We need 2020 bring in the summer of fun. We need that fun more than, uh, more than

01:39:09   ever. It's good. It's probably going to be the longest summer of fun we've ever done.

01:39:13   We started earlier and we're going to finish it later. So more fun, more fun.

01:39:18   This episode is also brought to you by our friends over at Linode, whether you're working on a

01:39:22   personal project or managing your enterprises infrastructure, Linode has the pricing support

01:39:27   and scale that you need to take your project to the next level. They have 11 data centers across

01:39:32   the world, including their newest in Sydney, Australia. And every one of them features

01:39:36   enterprise grade hardware and next generation networks to power your virtual servers. Linode

01:39:42   delivers the performance that you expect at a surprisingly good price. You can get started on

01:39:47   Linode today with a $20 credit for listeners of this show. You'll get access to S3 compatible

01:39:52   storage options. You'll get access to, if you need native SSD storage, 40 gigabit networks and

01:39:58   industry leading processes, they have everything that you're going to want, including one-click

01:40:04   installs of the most popular apps, including WordPress, LAMP stack game servers for Minecraft,

01:40:10   and they have tons of plan options. You can get nano plans start at just $5 a month, which is

01:40:15   super cheap, but they also do dedicated CPU plans of physical cores reserved just for you. If that's

01:40:21   the power and reliability that you need, go to linode.com/upgrade and use the promo code upgrade

01:40:27   2020 when creating a new Linode account, and you will get $20 towards your next project of credit

01:40:33   from them. So that's fantastic. L I N O D E.com/upgrade and the promo code upgrade 2020 for

01:40:40   that $20 credit. Our thanks to Linode for their support of this show and all of Relay FM.

01:40:45   Before we wrap up today, should we bring back #askupgrade? It's been a couple of weeks.

01:40:50   Yes, the lasers were waiting.

01:40:53   Marlies from the Discord asks, "Should I wait for the public beta or beg my former employer

01:41:00   to add me back to the developer account?" You know, it sounds like the developer beta

01:41:06   is pretty solid, and Marlies didn't say what OS here, but I would just say

01:41:14   Apple says that they're going to do public betas in July. It's about to be July. I think you could

01:41:19   wait. The nice thing about being on the public beta track is that if there's a disaster,

01:41:25   they just don't put it on the public beta track. Because the public beta is just staggered from the

01:41:31   developer beta release, and they do that in case of trouble. So I would say, "Don't talk to your

01:41:39   former employer. Who cares about those people? Just wait for the public beta."

01:41:44   Robin, also from the members Discord, had a question that we didn't really address in our

01:41:49   building of the Apple Silicon Mac. "Do you think that battery life or performance would be the most

01:41:55   appealing focus for Apple? What are they going to optimize for, do you think, Jason?"

01:42:00   Both, I would say. I would say that they're going to look for a balance, but I think that there are

01:42:07   I suspect that there is a battery life goal that they want to hit, and that there's a performance

01:42:14   goal they want to hit. Because I know that they want to come out and not have it be these max or

01:42:19   slower, right? They can't do that. So they're going to have to be faster. So the nice thing

01:42:24   about it is the way that Apple Silicon is structured is they have performance cores

01:42:30   and power saving cores. So the processors, because they are from mobile devices,

01:42:37   when they want to extend battery life, they can actually prioritize items for the power saving

01:42:43   cores and let the performance cores sit idle. So it's not quite the same choice you'd make on

01:42:50   an Intel Mac, but I do think they've got performance things that they will hit, and then

01:42:56   they've got a battery number. They don't want the battery life to be what they want to be,

01:42:58   they don't want the battery life to be worse, they don't want the performance to be worse.

01:43:01   And then after that, my guess is they're going to want to push up incrementally until they get to

01:43:08   there's a certain point at which I think they're going to say the battery life's okay and let's go

01:43:13   for performance here. But I think they're going to actually quote really great battery life and

01:43:16   performance numbers. And the trick is that because these processors have both kinds of cores, what

01:43:21   they're going to be able to say is in this kind of work, the battery lasts, web browsing, the battery

01:43:26   lasts 20 hours or 15 hours or whatever. And then in super intense work, the battery will last less,

01:43:32   which is true now kind of, but it's really going to be potentially true with these chips. So I think

01:43:38   they want to push them both up, they want to meet certain boundaries. And then beyond that, I think

01:43:42   they are, you know, maybe on a more pro model, they'll push performance a little more and on a

01:43:47   more consumer model for laptops, they'll push battery life, but they want them both to be good.

01:43:52   >> Jason, not you, asked, what's the one iOS app that you're most looking forward to running

01:43:57   on your Mac? For me, it is the Time Tracker app that I use called Timery. I use a web service

01:44:04   called Toggle for the time tracking and they have a Mac app, but it's bad. And even just using the

01:44:12   iOS version of Timery would be a big upgrade, even if they don't do a catalyst version. So that's the

01:44:19   one that I am like really, really looking forward to being able to have that, which is one of my

01:44:23   favorite iOS apps. I would love to see that one come to the Mac. And if I just get it via the iOS

01:44:30   stuff on Apple Silicon, I'll be very, very happy. >> Do you use shortcuts with that though?

01:44:34   >> Yeah, but... >> Yeah, so there's no shortcuts on the Mac.

01:44:37   >> But the app itself is fantastic. >> All right. Okay.

01:44:40   >> Because it's like, I always have the Timery app open and... Sorry, the Toggle app open on my Mac.

01:44:48   And at the moment, I have to just go in and if I'm setting a timer on my Mac,

01:44:51   choose from the dropdowns. And it's way nicer, way better experience, even if I just use the iOS app.

01:44:58   >> All right. For me, the one that I keep thinking of is MLB@bat, the Major League Baseball app,

01:45:06   assuming that baseball is played at some point in the future, because they offer... It's a great app

01:45:12   and there's all sorts of detail in there and they have a lousy website. And this is going to be a

01:45:16   trend. It'll be interesting to see what apps get put in the store and what don't. But I think a

01:45:22   good example of why you want iOS apps on your Mac is that a lot of experiences are, "We built an app

01:45:31   and if you can't run it, here's our lousy website." And there are lots of websites that I would rather

01:45:39   use their app, but on the Mac, I can't. So video, watching video on Major League MLB@bat is better.

01:45:49   I want that. I don't want... Also, a lot of Flash stuff is going away and a lot of stuff was built

01:45:53   with Flash. And I wonder how they're going to rebuild that stuff, but the Flash apps are lousy.

01:45:59   So there are lots of reasons, but MLB@bat is a good example of something that I prefer their app

01:46:04   vastly to their website. And then like, Fairite, the iPad editing app, audio podcast editing app

01:46:13   that I use, that will be great when it comes to the Mac. And I'm looking forward to that too.

01:46:18   - Ryan asks, "How many years do you think will be on Mac OS 11 or is this a time when they increment

01:46:26   the number every year like they do on iOS?" - I think it'll be a while.

01:46:30   - I think it's going to be like 10, like it will be 11.1, 11.2. I don't think we're going to get

01:46:36   Mac OS 12 anytime soon. - I agree. I agree. I think it'll be,

01:46:41   you know, five or 10 years. Yeah. - Which I think just fits better. Like if

01:46:45   they were going to go for the annual incrementing, then they may have just... They may as well have

01:46:50   just called this Mac OS 14. - Exactly.

01:46:53   - Just to keep them all at the same. If they weren't going to... If they were going to increment

01:46:56   it every year, I don't think they're going to do that. I don't think they moved this year because

01:47:01   that's the new trend. I think they moved this year because they're making so many changes that 11

01:47:06   felt right. And I think it's now going to be a new number every year. Finally today, Brandon in the

01:47:11   Relay FM members Discord asked, "Is Apple's tag product dead or do you think they're going to

01:47:16   release it in the fall with the new Find My API?" Which snuck in, this one, that there is an API

01:47:24   that Apple have developed where you will be able to integrate your tracking product into Find My.

01:47:30   So for example, in theory, if you are a company like Tile who have raised an antitrust complaint

01:47:36   against Apple, you can integrate your application and your devices, I should say, with the Find My

01:47:44   app, potentially leveling a playing field a little bit more for a tracking product, which might be a

01:47:51   very good thing to do if you have lots of antitrust probes against your company right now.

01:47:56   - Yeah, when I saw this, my initial thought was, "Oh, is Apple tags not happening?" But I think

01:48:04   you're right. I think it's just as likely that this allows them to launch Apple tags and do what

01:48:10   they should be doing, right? Which is competing on the quality of their product and not the fact

01:48:14   that they control the Find My infrastructure. And so that way, if Tile wanted to build something

01:48:18   that was Find My compatible, they could do it and it would work fine. And then they're just

01:48:22   gonna have to compete with Apple on all of the other ways that they compete, but not that you're

01:48:28   barred from the Find My little mini ecosystem. So there's so much detail about those Apple tags

01:48:36   that it's hard to believe that they aren't gonna actually ship at some point. And this was a bad

01:48:42   time for that product. So maybe later it will be a better product. But it's also possible that Apple

01:48:50   is like, "Let's just let the third parties do it and we're not gonna bother." It's possible.

01:48:54   - If you would like to send in a question for a future episode of Upgrade, just send out a tweet

01:48:59   with the hashtag #AskUpgrade or in the Relay FM members Discord, use the command ?AskUpgrade and

01:49:06   you can submit your questions there. In the Upgrade Plus post show today, we're gonna talk

01:49:11   about some early impressions of the betas that we've been using. If you wanna sign up for Upgrade

01:49:15   Plus, you can go to getupgradeplus.com and sign up. Thank you to all of our wonderful members

01:49:19   that have signed up already and we hope that you continue to enjoy the content.

01:49:22   As we mentioned, the summer of fun has begun. It happened by surprise today, but we have another

01:49:30   topic that we're gonna do next week, which you can prepare for at home. We're gonna be doing a

01:49:35   Myke at the Movies about the Hamilton movie on Disney Plus. So that's gonna be in next week's

01:49:41   episode. Me and Jason are both very excited about that one. Cannot wait to watch the original

01:49:47   Broadway cast of Hamilton. So we're gonna be doing that next week, which will be a very long-term

01:49:53   follow-up from the Myke at the Movies we did when I went to see Hamilton. - Myke at the matinee,

01:49:58   I think is what we called it. - That was it, yes. Will this be Myke at the matinee or Myke at the

01:50:02   Movies? I guess it's movie now, right? - Yeah, or it's upstream. Maybe it's upstream. - Oh boy.

01:50:07   Upstream might come back next week. I have a ton of headlines, but we just haven't had the space

01:50:12   to fit them in. So we've got a lot of stuff going on next week. Thank you so much for tuning in to

01:50:16   this week's episode of Upgrade. You can find links and information about this episode at

01:50:20   relate.fm/upgrade/304. I want to thank again our sponsors for this episode, Pingdom, Linode,

01:50:27   and Bombas. If you want to find Jason online, go to sixcolors.com, where he is @jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L.

01:50:33   I am @imike. We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. - Goodbye, Myke Hurley.

01:50:40   Summer of fun! - Summer of fun!

01:50:42   [music]